With her discomforting new psychological thriller Always Shine premiering as part of the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, filmmaker Sophia Takal has already drawn comparisons to Brian De Palma, David Lynch, and even Ingmar Bergman with her new film. Yet, reviews of Always Shine that point to the film’s central pair of femme fatale-style blondes or the voyeuristic lens it applies to its actresses overlook a significant quality of Takal’s 2nd feature. “I don’t really know that there are a lot of movies about female friendships that ring true to me,” she begins during an early interview one morning in Midtown. “At least none that I’ve seen that I can think of right now.”

The tension in Always Shine is fueled by the mutual envy between its leads Anna (Mackenzie Davis) and Beth (Caitlin FitzGerald) best friends who decide to rebuild their broken bond by spending a weekend together in Big Sur. More than just spending time with one another, the trip is a chance for both actresses to escape how the outside world views them, as well as the roles—both personal and professional—in which they feel trapped. As the two old friends reconnect, their underlying resentment for one another turns their vacation into an anxiety nightmare with dangerous consequences.

In her sit-down interview with Way Too Indie during Tribeca, Always Shine director Sophia Takal discusses the competitive jealousy that inspired her film, the thematic importance of having female characters portray actresses, and how Always Shine helped the filmmaker come to terms with the competing aspects of her own personality.

Always Shine was written by your husband [screenwriter Lawrence Michael Levine, who also plays Jesse in the film], were you part of the initial development of this idea?
Sophia Takal: I came up with a tiny seed of the idea of wanting to make a movie about my own struggles with fitting into a normal idea of femininity. I made a movie called Green, and right after that movie came out something got triggered in me where I felt insanely competitive with all my friends—actor friends, director friends – and I was sabotaging those relationships. I was filled with all this rage and I was so angry.

I was taught that the right way to be a woman was to be shy and deferential—to not take up too much space—but I felt so big and bossy and aggressive and I just felt so bad about myself. It was creating this very violent conflict within me, and Larry was sort of just watching me unravel, go totally crazy and alienate everyone around me. We started talking a little bit about how I was feeling. I always gravitate toward making movies about really personal things.

I started talking to other women about saying “I really don’t feel like a woman, I don’t feel like I’m doing a good job at this,” and they would say “I don’t feel that way either.” I realized that it wasn’t just specific to me, but maybe there was a little bit more of a universal struggle that we were experiencing as women. So I wrote a one-page outline of ideas for how I could make it into a movie.

Larry really connected with these feelings. He had felt [competitive] towards me, [like] I was feeling towards other people. He had similar feelings about not fitting into the typical masculine roles of being really, really rich, and really, really powerful, and not emotional, and not crying. He said, “I felt a similar alienation from the set of expectations of my gender and I think that we could do something really interesting.” He’s an incredible writer, a much better writer than I am. So I just trusted him to create a script based on our shared set of experiences.

We did think it was important to address femininity rather than [make it] about a man. He read a lot of feminist books about female archetypes. There’s this one really great book called “Down From the Pedestal” [by Maxine Harris], which was all about different female archetypes and how women fit into them. He read books about celebrity obsession, “Fame Junkies” [by Jake Halpern] and “Gods Like Us” [by Ty Burr]. A lot about feminism and celebrity.

So that increased attention to your careers was a part of the inspiration, as well?
Definitely. Larry and I both got very career-obsessed. Just striving, grasping, not being satisfied with anything we had. Really feeling that our self-worth was bound up in this idea that we needed to become famous. And I feel like we just fell prey to what our society tells us, where celebrities are the new gods. It’s hard to feel valuable in a society that tells you that the most valuable people are these tall, beautiful men and women. It’s a bummer.

I was talking with Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Nerdland, about this desperation from the fringes of the entertainment industry. The tangible aspects of modern fame, I think, makes it seem not so out of grasp, which can drive you insane if you’re in that periphery.
Yeah. Also, because a lot of people are famous for no reason. The act of getting famous is a focus, rather than the act of creating and fame [coming] as a byproduct of that. It seems to have taken people over more and more. I talked with Mackenzie and Caitlin about that a lot. That when you become an actor you become an actor because you want to create something and enter this secret space where you’re connecting with someone. Then the weird by-product of being successful at that and getting to work is being pigeonholed into these tinier and tinier boxes.

[You] go to fashion shows and wear makeup and it’s not at all to do with why you started wanting to be an artist. A lot of business type people in the industry convince you that that’s essential in order to be an artist. Especially with actors. The less you know about an actor, the better the experience watching them work is going to be because you don’t have all the baggage. This internet age where you know everything about everyone is especially bad for everyone. Who’s someone really famous?

Ben Affleck.
Ben Affleck, yeah!

We spent a whole two years saying, “He doesn’t look like Batman.”
There’s just so much stuff, yeah. Like, “He had an affair with his baby sitter,” or whatever.

The femininity aspects in the film are really interesting, too. Particularly relating to the whole duality of these characters, balancing, “is this who I am?” with, “is this who I want to be?”
Definitely. To me, thematically, those are two sides of one woman. The process that I’ve undergone in my life is to synthesize those two aspects, rather than feeling pulled toward feeling small, getting angry that I wasn’t that way, and getting pulled in two directions. My personal journey has been to merge those two sides to become a more whole, balanced person. To not be mad at myself for not feeling one way, or reacting another way. They are two sides of the same person. And some people may naturally gravitate towards one. But both are kind of a performance.

There is that really interesting moment when you first introducing Mackenzie’s character and it’s made to look like an audition scene. Do you feel like that desire to be a certain type of person forces us to be performative in real life?

Yeah, I can only speak to my experience. But I feel like I’m performing all the time. Interacting with people is a negotiation. And I think as a woman, you’re taught how to perform to get what you need. Like, to seduce, or all these [prompts] that you could give to an actor at any time in a scene.

I think that was true, and that’s something we wanted to hone in on in the movie. And that’s why we used a lot of alienation and breaking of the fourth wall techniques, too, to remind people it’s not just actors who perform. It’s all of us who perform in our everyday lives and are choosing to present something to the world, [something] that’s been fed to us, rather than [present] who we really are.

To literalize some of that conflict by making them both actresses, was that something you debated at any point or was that there from the beginning?
It was always going to be actors in my mind. Mainly, because I started as an actor, so I really related to that. Then, a couple of producers and money people said, “Does it have to be actors? Because that’s not so accessible,” but I disagree. Birdman won an Oscar.

I always said, “No, it has to be actors.” I could never really articulate exactly why. And then this one filmmaker named Elisabeth Subrin has this really awesome blog called “Who Cares About Actresses?” And she articulates it so well, so I’m kind of just copying what she says. But it says that actresses represent to women what women are supposed to be. So when you choose how to portray a woman by picking an actress, you’re just telling women how to behave.

And then they become these archetypal figures.
Yeah, they’re just like tools to pigeonhole. I wanted to play around a lot with how actresses are used, which is why one thing I was excited about when I came onto it was obscuring the nudity. Almost showing them naked so that the audience would feel in their bodies that they wanted to see them naked and have to confront that feeling. Or obscuring the violence was another thing. I don’t know if this is the reaction people had, but it would be so cool if people were like, “Why can’t I see her kill her?!” and then get frustrated and say, “Why do I want to see her kill her?”

It’s that thing where you’re sort of seeking an answer that you already know. I found myself sitting there waiting to see a death scene but also knowing I didn’t need it. That’s a weird impulse.
Yeah, I just thought it might be interesting for people to sit with their desires rather than being given everything.

What were some of your visual influences? The quick splicing of scenes, the unsettling, disorienting style was really engaging and disorienting.
Mark Schwartzbard shot the movie and we watched Three Women like eight or nine times, and Images, the Robert Altman movie. We bought this 1960s zoom lens that was totally unused off of eBay, which was really cool. That was the only one we used for the whole movie.

Then Zach Clark edited it, and I had shown him a couple minutes of something that I had cut myself. I said, “I really want this to be weird and unsettling but I have no idea what to do.” Then he cut the opening credit sequence first and I was like, “Oh yeah, do that always, everywhere in the movie.” He kind of just brought the blinky, splicy stuff to me, and I thought it was amazing. He’s the one kind of responsible for more of the avant-garde elements. Seeing the slates – all those things – he added a whole other layer to the film. He really found visual ways to make it interesting.

A lot of what’s happening on-screen is not that unsettling or strange, but it’s the presentation of it – whether it’s the score or just that interstitching – that makes it so tense. Particularly, the scene where they’re running lines together.
Yeah, it’s so cool, they were really good!

Were you deliberately looking to make seemingly smaller moments play big?
Yes, definitely. My first movie, Green, I was also playing around with elements of genre, but it wasn’t as much of a genre movie. And this I really wanted to make it a psychological thriller, but I still wanted to root it in naturalism and [keep it] performance-driven. So all the choices we made with shooting was to make it as scary as possible

Same with music and editing. And I got really lucky with the actors because I love single-take scenes and they were so talented that we didn’t need to cut a performance. They were just able to do it on set. Not cutting away in certain tense moments built more tension, so I was really glad to be able to have that.

How did Mackenzie and Caitlin get involved? Did you seek them out?
They both came to me through agents and casting directors in the more traditional way. We cast Mackenzie first, and she just really understood Anna, understood the script. I was really excited and I was a huge fan of her work. Caitlin’s agent reached out to me, I was also a huge fan of her work. They were the two women that I spoke to that totally understood the script backwards and forwards, and had clear, specific ideas for their characters.

For me, as the director, casting is essential. Part of the way I decide to cast someone, I choose the person who I think is going to need the least amount of help. For everyone in the cast and crew, I just want everyone who can do their job so I stay out of the way. That’s a big part of what I was looking for. People who really understand this material, people who were willing to come out with me into the woods, work with a really small crew, do the weird hippy new-agey warm-ups I insist on doing and the meditation. People who feel that this is an important movie to make with important themes. Not just people who say “Oh I get to have the lead in an indie.” There was a lot of trust between the three of us that really moved me. It was really exciting and cool. It was the first time I worked with actresses that I didn’t have a relationship with before.

I was wondering if at any point you had considered casting either of them in the opposite role.
No.

It was clear from the start?
It was clear from the start. Yeah.

You’re a multi-hyphenate, actress being one of them. Was there any point where you thought you might be in this film?
At the very beginning when I gave Larry that one page I was like, “let’s just go into Big Sur and improvise a movie.” And he was like, “No, this could be better than that,” And I said, “I’m only going to give up my part if I find someone who I think can do a better job than me.” Then I did. And the role is so intense and aggressive that in order to inhabit that space I would be a terribly mean director.

The process was really important to me. Not knowing what was going to happen to a tiny independent film, I just focused on making sure that making this movie was as fulfilling as possible for everyone involved and that we learn and grow as a group and as individuals through this one month. So I thought that I could facilitate this kind of energetic whatever by being just a director. And it was so much easier than acting and directing. I acted in my first movie. Part of what’s fun about acting is losing yourself in the moment, but if you’re directing too, you can’t.

So you prefer to focus your energy in that way?
I think I do now.

Are you planning any other projects now?
Yeah, I have a script ready, but still not really big. But it’s more of a light dramedy. It will be an interesting shift to move away from these genre elements and focus more on like real life. I definitely don’t want to get pigeonholed as a genre director. Someone talked to me after the movie and said, “There are so few female genre directors, you could really make a big career out of it, do studio stuff,” and I was like, “Uh, I don’t know.”

That to me seems weird, I don’t like genre movies more than any other movies. For me, the through-line with all my ideas is that I’m talking about issues that women have that they’re maybe ashamed to acknowledge publicly. It can spark a dialogue and make them feel less alone, and I don’t think it needs to be any particular genre to do that.

One of the very interesting things about Always Shine is that it does talk about jealousy between friends in a way people tend to not acknowledge or not want to acknowledge, at least. Have you thought about why it’s so difficult to confront?
Do you have that feeling with other male friends?

I think I do. For me, it’s about relative positions in life. And certain people get, like, a nice apartment, or a nice promotion. It’s like a milestone type of thing.
Yeah, I guess I could go deep into an anti-capitalism rant right now. I think it’s the nature of capitalism to have a scarcity mentality and to feel like there’s not enough to go around for everyone. I think that’s particularly true about actresses. That’s another reason I think it’s a cool career to give these two characters. There’s one part and one person can get it.

And it’s not necessarily about talent or anything.
Yeah, I really think that’s true for everyone, I think that that’s a big problem with this society’s obsession with money and power.

It’s an unflattering obsession to have.
Yeah, and then it’s embarrassing. The reason I asked you about men was because with women there’s a huge emphasis on perfection and quietness and not challenging, and so that’s why I was wondering if that was why we don’t like to talk about it, but I don’t know. If everyone feels that way then I don’t know what it is.

Maybe it is just the sense of acknowledging that you don’t feel good enough or you haven’t accomplished enough.
Right. Because everyone’s performing, so you want to create this image of success or having it all together and not being jealous. But then it’s eating away at you inside, making you go crazy, and all of the sudden you’re screaming and crying in the post office. Just like, “Why can’t you give me my package without an ID?!” That didn’t actually happen.

It’s a metaphorical post office.
But I did really shove my boyfriend’s manager because he called me a primadonna. So [the movie’s] based on real life.

Transcription assistance from Jason Gong

As a Brit who lived for many years in Spain before coming to America during New York City Football Club’s inaugural season, documentarian Justin Webster’s background mirrors that of many of the players on Major League Soccer team rosters. Benefiting from his personal connection to the City Football Group, as well as some fortunate timing, Webster found himself preparing to start a new vérité-style film project right as City were ready to announce their entry into America’s 20-year-old soccer league. Yet, the final result of Win! is about as far from PR promotional product as one could imagine. Using unprecedented access to locker rooms, player retreats and board rooms, Justin Webster’s new documentary gives an intimate look into the lives and struggles of a professional soccer organization going through the ups and downs of its founding.

In his sit down interview with Way Too Indie from the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, Win! director Justin Webster talks about getting access to world-renowned superstars like David Villa and Frank Lampard, the challenge of vérité-style documentary filmmaking, and making calculations about how much information to make explicit.

How embedded did you want to become in this process? How day-to-day was your involvement following the birth of NYCFC?
Justin Webster: For viable, practical reasons, and budget reasons, we couldn’t follow the whole thing for a year and a half every day. So we had about four and a half months of filming and I had to choose when to go. It was spread out to try to capture the twists, stories and the characters. Sometimes things happen that needs to get covered by somebody else. But as this style of filming isn’t that easy to do, that was a challenge, too. So to get somebody else to film while we weren’t there wasn’t the ideal situation. My production team is highly trained and highly skilled in this kind of filming.

The vérité style really lends a really immersive aspect to Win! It gives an unfiltered look at professional athletes that isn’t often on display. Was it tricky to coordinate, or to get these athletes to open up and allow themselves to curse or say something off-color on camera?
Sure. There’s a whole art to this observational filming, done well. Part of it is explaining very carefully and then filming an awful lot. Because when they trust you and they ignore you, then you’re in the position to start getting some real scenes.

And you may not [get good footage], you may be filming for hours and hours and hours and nothing gets into the cut. The team filming has to be on the same level of attention the whole time. When it comes to the players, we got along very well. They very, very graciously ignored us.

And enough to get some of those really candid, interesting moments that anyone interested in the sport wants to see. Those little interactions between a coach and a player or a coach and a manager aren’t normally for public consumption. Was part of your interest in capturing those moments that might seem minor but reveal bits of personality?
I couldn’t put it better myself, in fact. People ask me, “What was the message of the film?” and in a way the message of the film was the style. You see what you think you know, but you don’t really know until you see it. It’s like they’re acting. They’re not acting, but if an actor glances one way, or twitches some way, or looks up, it becomes much more revealing. You see everything in a slightly different light. It’s like actually being there, and that’s stimulating for you to think about what you thought you knew. I think you put it better. Those little details can be very revealing.

There’s a version of this movie that could be made where you explain the MLS rules of the expansion draft, or the protected players clauses; however, a lot of it is left for the viewer to piece together. How much of a calculation is that for you? Explaining the complexities of a world without become bogged down by those intricacies?
Well, that’s a really interesting point when it comes to making film. You need to tell enough that it’s not confusing, but if you start telling too much it becomes boring. Things like the expansion draft, even Claudio and Jason when we interviewed them said, “I’m not sure we can explain it completely,” it’s so complicated. You just have to know enough so you’re not confused. So you know the in expansion draft they’re competing to get some players, actually American players. That’s the important thing.

I’m hoping, and it was a calculation, you’re right, that I put in the right layer of information so that it helps the story, because there is a storyline about how this is the tipping point of soccer in the US, for instance, and the pressures around that.

You pick up that this is this post-World Cup wave, but it’s only a few clips in the actually movie where we see them. Is that something you decide to include in post or is this something you feel you have a natural felt would be part of the story?
I have a boring, kind of [mantra] I repeat again and again. I always say that you have to have two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time and still maintain the ability to function, which is a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald. The two ideas are, “this is the script,” “there is no script.” So you start off with an idea. And so those sort of ideas about the World Cup and where we were, I think they’re always there.

Of course, just a little is enough. Threading in the right level of information, the longer cuts were around 2.5 hours. I started editing fairly early on. It’s a process. With any luck you end up with everything in the right kind of proportion.

You mentioned that you lived in Spain, and you get some really great access with David Villa in the documentary. Was your ability to speak with him or relate to him part of what facilitated getting some of those honest, revealing moments where you see him frustrated with his inability to communicate?
I think so. It’ll be very interesting to see what he says. It wasn’t necessarily easy to film closely with anybody, and he opened up steadily. The fact that we speak Spanish – not just me but the director of photography, my assistant director and producer, the sound person, we’re all bilingual Spanish-English. We talked a lot with David’s father, as well, when he came to training sessions. I think it all helped; building trust like that was essential.

With her background as the star and creator of Pulling, as well as her other work British TV shows, Sharon Horgan has become a recognizable face on British television; however, her latest show Catastrophe marks her first with an American audience. The Channel 4 / Amazon Studios co-production dropped its entire second season earlier in April, picking up years after the drama of the first season, with Rob and Sharon (the show’s co-creators Horgan & Rob Delaney share first names with their characters) married and struggling to raise two children. Both seasons of the Catastrophe are not only hysterically funny, they’re warm and optimistic in a way that runs counter to many cynical, modern TV comedies.

In her short interview with Way Too Indie on the red carpet for Catastrophe‘s panel at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, Sharon Horgan discusses the advantage television has when developing romantic comedies, the importance of making a show that was more than just gags, and why it’s better to just laugh at Rob’s jokes on screen.

Romantic comedies in film haven’t been quite as popular this decade as they were in the past; however, the first season of your show Catastrophe, as well as several others on TV right now, function as really successful romantic comedies. Do you think romantic comedies function better in that episodic format rather than in film?

I guess it does but it’s also easier to make a romantic comedy because you’re not pandering to a huge audience. I think a lot of romantic comedy in film is aimed at a massive audience, so you’ve got to tick a lot of boxes and please a lot of people. The only people we had to please [on Catastrophe] were ourselves.

Also, we never thought about it as a romantic comedy so we weren’t trying to fit it into a formula. I think that can sometimes be the problem with romantic comedy in film. It has to hit all [those] beats.

We had an easy job. I think it’s harder on film but it’d be fun to have a go.

You and Rob Delaney have a delightful chemistry on the show, even small details like laughing at one another’s jokes really illustrates the healthy dynamic between your characters as a couple.

Yeah, I mean it is a bit of a cheat because it’s easier to laugh when someone says something funny on film than not laugh. But also, the big thing about the characters and why they like each other is because they find each other funny. Any romance or relationship is generally – apart from sex – based on someone who makes you laugh.

We thought it was really, really important that even in season two, even when they’re in the deep quagmires of marriage that they still made each other laugh. It just felt like more of an honest representation. I don’t think anyone tells anyone a joke in real life and they meet it with a frozen face.

But that is something you’re consciously making sure is a part of the dynamic?

Sure, but also it’s easier to do it that way. It’s easier when Rob says something funny to just laugh.

Your characters face adversity, different ups and down on the show, but it retains a hopefulness throughout. Was that something you wanted to be part of Catastrophe from the onset or did that come from writing the show?

It was really important from the outset. I think we both got to a point in our lives where we felt like we didn’t just want to make a show with a load of gags. We wanted it to be saying something and to hit all those spots. So that people who are watching feel that we’re invested in them and therefore they’ll invest in us. None of it’s easy. Having kids isn’t easy. Being married isn’t easy and we kind of wanted to tell people that things can be ok. All these terrible, shitty things can happen to you but there’s quite often a light at the end of the tunnel, and you’ll get through it.

I think comedy is just such a brilliant medium for that. It’s so great to be able to talk about serious subjects through making people laugh.

Feeling oddly jealous—and embarrassed about that jealousy—when her sister was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Sophie Goodhart began developing a story about a tense sibling relationship largely built around resentment. That inspiration led to her 2003 short film My Blind Brother, which at the time seemed like a launching point for her smooth transition into feature filmmaking. “Since then I’ve had three or four films green-lit, ready to go, and then something happened,” Sophie laments from the Tribeca Film Festival. Her new feature-length directorial debut, also titled My Blind Brother, has been a long time coming, but the version Sophie finally got to make comes with a standout cast.

In her interview with Way Too Indie, My Blind Brother writer / director Sophie Goodhart discusses the long path to production for her debut, spending her option money too quickly, and the benefits of working with longtime friends like Nick Kroll, Adam Scott, and Jenny Slate.

I wanted to ask you about the film’s journey into development because this is a story that’s personal to you, but it’s also a movie that was based on a short film that you had directed.
Sophie Goodhart: Yeah, [the idea started with] my sister being diagnosed with M.S. [multiple sclerosis] when I was in my early twenties. I was sort of embarrassed and kind of surprised to find that I was feeling kind of jealous—and really embarrassed by my jealousy—about the fact that I knew that she was always going to be this incredible hero that battled against great misfortune. So that’s where the short came from.

I got incredibly lucky and worked with three great actors—Tony Hale, John Mattey and Marsha Dietlein—in the original. The short kind of got me agents, and got me certain contacts. Immediately I got these films optioned, and I was like, “Look at me, I’m about to really do it!” I had parties where I bought lots of people drinks where I celebrated my success. Unfortunately, I was, like, way, way, way too soon. I realized that was an expensive mistake to make.

Since then I’ve had three or four films greenlit, ready to go, and then something happened. 2008 happened, everyone needed their money and you couldn’t make films. Or one of the actors leaves and I can’t find a replacement or you couldn’t spend a certain budget on the film. I was writing something completely separate from [My Blind Brother], and was just focused on the Jenny Slate character—about a woman who was going out with this guy who gets killed by a bus just after she’s dumped him. She feels terrible, she kind of hates herself and finds herself on a weird path where she would have been a tragic victim and instead she was just a cruel ex-girlfriend. I realized that her story fit really, really well with this other story so I put them together in this feature. I had to wait around for the perfect cast, the perfect three people, who would mean that I could get over a million to shoot the movie.

There’s a way to interpret the logline of this movie as a broad, Mr. Magoo-style comedy, but your movie stays very tethered to reality. Was there an impulse to go broader or do you prefer to keep your writing grounded?
SG: I always write about things I’m feeling, or worrying about, or have experienced in one way or another. You know, I could research the whole world, or a new environment or a new job, but to have that kind of basic character issue that I’m not connected to I think would make it difficult. I think that the fact that it’s based on some of these feelings that I’ve had, meant that it could [depict] a mean-spirited aspect of humanity. Because it wasn’t just an outsider looking in and mocking it. It was something familiar that I felt and believed.

You had mentioned your three lead actors came aboard as a kind of package. How did you get Jenny Slate, Adam Scott, and Nick Kroll all become involved?
SG: It’s one of those things where you never know which people you meet in your life are going to be the ones to make things happen. It turned out that Sharon Jackson at William Morris Endeavor really connected to the movie, and she had confidence in it. She had enough power to make connections to these people. But I didn’t know that when I initiated talking to her. I wasn’t like, “This is the woman that’s gonna package it.”

The three people who kind of made it happen were my initial producer, Tori, who found the short film. That was reassuring and good news for people doing shorts is that [making them] actually can make a huge difference. Somebody can like it, and they can mention you to try and help you get a feature. Then, Sharon; it’s not often in big agent’s interests to put their time into small films—and this kind of a low budget indie film—but she took a fancy to it and sent it to these bigger actors. Finally, Tyler Davidson saw [our cast], read the script and was like, “Fine, I’m happy to give you a bit more money” than he originally would have been inclined to. It just takes so many happy accidents to get off the ground. And it took such a long time. I felt like I was ready for those happy accidents.

Sometimes it can feel fated in a way.
SG: Yeah, I think after 13 years sitting in my kitchen writing I was like, “oh my god.” It was only hardcore delusion and denial that has meant that I made this because any other human would have just thought, “fuck this, it’s not working.”

What was it like for Jenny Slate and Nick Kroll—who have worked together several times before—and to work with them on developing a romantic dynamic, especially one that is played pretty straight throughout?
SG: With Jenny and Nick and Adam, you just get this unbelievable mix of people who are so intelligent and so good at acting. So nimble about playing jokes and playing them so straight or so small, that they can do pretty much anything. When they read this script, they knew that it was this romantic element, and I didn’t want to play it jokingly. I think they totally delivered. I think the fact that they’re friends meant that I didn’t have to do as much work as I might’ve. And there’s such a beautiful ease between them that I could just say, “And kiss now,” and they just were comfortable, grown-up and intelligent. They were good at acting so it was easy.

What other movies and directors did you look to for influence when putting this movie together?
SG: Two directors that I love are James L. Brooks and Elaine May. I also looked to David O. Russell and Silver Linings Playbook. Then, Knife in the Water, even though tonally it’s so weird—I love the kind of graphic quality of [Polanski’s] work. Elaine May! Her original The Heartbreak Kid is just so fucking good. So those are my inspirations, obviously.

There aren’t many professions in which asking your co-workers whether or not they’ve participated in an orgy is part of regular life, and even fewer outside of the adult film industry. Between Us filmmaker Rafael Palacio Illingworth doesn’t want to shy away from exploring sexual fantasy, as well as the disparity between those desires and reality. It’s what prompted him to appear fully naked as the lead actor in his debut feature film Macho. It’s also what inspires his deeply intimate story about a couple tempted with adultery in Between Us.

As for the filmmaker’s penchant for asking frank, sexually-skewed questions of his co-stars during their first meetings over coffee, Rafael explains that he was seeking, “an assurance that we can tell an honest story. For me, when somebody shows up and he comes with his social media in mind or publicist in mind, all these things are blocks to the story. If they have a problem with telling that truth then I have a problem.”

In Rafael Palacio Illingworth’s interview on Between Us with Way Too Indie during the Tribeca Film Festival, the filmmaker discusses the real-life spat that inspired the movie, what types of questions he peppered the actors with prior to casting, and how Mad Men helped put Ben Feldman on the director’s radar.

What lead you to the creation of Between Us?

I developed it for three years but the idea first came to me a couple years before that. I had this fight with my girlfriend, and I stormed out of the apartment – which I had never done before – and then walking I thought to myself, “What I find the perfect girl right now?”

Of course, that never happened. I came back 20 minutes after. Actually, I’m married to her now, even. It was then I realized that all these fantasies are more like an antidote for your anger than anything [else]. It’s easy to think, “If I leave you I’ll have a line of girls waiting for me.” But the reality is not that.

So that idea came a long time ago and I wanted to shoot it as an unscripted thing before having my first child – only child for now – but I didn’t have time. So then I connected with Caviar [Production Company, which also produced last year’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl] and it just organically happened from there with a script.

How did the idea mold from your writing process?

Talking about these impulses – these kinds of naïve impulses – of doing something unscripted and powerful. Usually, at that point, your ideas are like, “I’m going to do a movie about everything.” You know? [A movie] about everything that’s ever existed. QW you sit down to write the words and realize you have to translate whatever you’re feeling to something it becomes real.

I think the process was really good for the project, and really helped shape it into something because it had to become real and intimate. For example, there are these bookends of the clouds. The movie used to be called The Force, up until recently. Because it spoke about that force always wants to push us around and make you think there’s someone else around; all this temptation and desire. In early versions of the script, [this sense] came from outer space to the inner world through clouds.

I realized whatever it is, it’s between them. It’s there in that apartment where they’re sitting. In front of them, between them, no pun intended.

That [process] is what I went through for the whole script. It was a grand story that tried to talk about everything until we shaved it down to be about this intimate couple and these struggles that they have.

Right, at some point you have to hone in on your focus.

So finding that was the challenge but compared to the general structure, the script didn’t change much. It was always the story of this guy walking out of the house in a rage and then dealing with the consequences of finding this girl that he thinks is the perfect girl.

How early did you get Ben Feldman and Olivia Thirlby involved, and what made you know they’d be right for their parts?

When we went out to start casting it was very important for us to get that main couple right. First, we started going out to guys. The first person that really responded on my list of preferred guys was Ben. This was when he had just finished Mad Men, and he had done an amazing job there. He liked the script. At that moment he hadn’t done any dramatic films, he had only been in horror films.

So I found it interesting that he was not a guy who would come with his own baggage or his own brand. He responded to [the script], we met, had a nice conversation and we connected really well as friends. That was the most important thing to me because being a small movie I needed someone that I could trust that was going to help me out. Whatever that means.

I wasn’t experienced in directing A-list actors, so I also wanted to be open in expressing what I was expecting and what I was fearing. I shared all that and I realized this guy’s a friend. We barely talked about our film; it was more about, “Where do you live? What do you like?” I knew we could sit down for a coffee regardless of any movie. That was what made me think that this guy was going to be right.

After [Ben was cast] we went out for girls, and Olivia also responded [to the script]. Funny enough they hadn’t met until after they were both cast. I had the same experience with Olivia when we met. In a different way, obviously, but I also felt like she was into exploring, and helping, and being open. I realized that if they both can do this then the three of us could do it. It was risky but I think it was fine and they’re both so open and nice.

Were those conversations with the actors partially about their own views toward love or intimacy, since those feelings play such major roles in Between Us?

Yes, I think most of our conversations were about our very private lives. Look, I have nothing to lose. Everything’s on the screen. Sometimes I would just come to them and say, “How is it? You’re married. Have you ever cheated? Have you ever gone to an orgy?” It was all these things. It was kind of rushed, very quick, but it was nice. The advantage that I have is that my movies are clearly self-referential so there’s no secret. I’m not talking about a character.

Especially if you’ve seen my first feature film, which has me acting [in it] and I also get naked. That gave me a really good platform to say, “It’s not going to be as explicit as my first movie but it is in this world of honesty.” I don’t want the camera or the Hollywood desires to be in front of us telling an honest story.

So I would ask if they were okay getting naked or how okay they were with sex scenes. How not [okay they were]. Where could I go with it. I had that conversation with Ben although he had no nudity [in the movie]. It was just about knowing that if needed we will go there.

And also to know that they would be open to feeling that necessity. They could suggest it to me. Which would happen with Olivia. Sometimes I would be like, “Cover her here,” to be very proper and she would say, “Come on, it has to be real.” I expect that and those are the things I make clear from the beginning.

Green Room is sure to go down as the most overwhelmingly intense movie of 2016, and unless another filmmaker can match Jeremy Saulnier’s knack for suspense, violence, and pulling the rawest performances out of his actors possible, it’ll reign as genre-movie king for a good long while.

Starring Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Blue Ruin‘s Macon Blair, and Patrick Stewart, the film finds a hardcore band trapped in the green room of a secluded punk rock venue in the forested Northwest, surrounded and outnumbered by murderous neo-nazi thugs led by a cunning leader (Stewart). Over the course of one night, blood and limbs fly, bones break, flesh gets ripped to shreds, and egoes get smashed to pieces as we bear witness to the ensuing melee.

In a roundtable interview, we spoke to Saulnier and Yelchin in San Francisco about the movie, which is in theaters now.

Murder Party was also primarily shot in one location. That was shot about a decade ago. I’m curious how you’ve approached Green Room differently and how you’ve applied the things you’ve learned over the past ten years.
Jeremy: After Murder Party, which is an overnight, sort of contained scenario, I swore I’d never do it again. So…I’m an idiot. I learned a lot about what’s supposedly cheapest and most convenient, which is shooting a film in one location so that you have control over it. But, cinematically, I found it lacking. I was using a great steadycam operator and kind of set him loose, but I didn’t feel like it was fully realized, visually and cinematically.

For Blue Ruin, I did the opposite: tons of locations, open air, eight-page scenes. That was what I was attracted to. Green Room was just an idea I loved but was resisting because of the nature of what it contained. The siege scenario. But I felt like, because of the dynamics of it taking place in the green room of a concert venue during a live show, it was just something I couldn’t let go of.

Visually, I had an exterior element that was kind of swirling and always moving, very visually rich and kinetic. Inside, I had had to work on how to cover these scenes without exhausting the actors. I didn’t quite figure that out because you had to get these performances and you couldn’t be so kinetic. Green Room is much more visually precise and better realized. I wasn’t afraid. When we had to lock a camera and just shoot what the actor was saying, the impact of the performance is what’s really driving the story, not so much how I use the camera. We let the actors lead the way.

You’ve been DP on all of your films until now. What was it like passing on the torch and focusing on directing?
Jeremy: Based on the necessity of this production, it was easy and kind of inevitable. For Blue Ruin, it’s a kind of quiet film. There are about three major dialogue scenes, and the rest is primarily wordless. Every shot was the story. My intuitive approach to how I was moving the camera and how I was framing the camera is how I told the story. I couldn’t do it any other way.

Green Room, with the ensemble cast, the stunts, the bloodwork, the special effects…it was way more of a challenge than Blue Ruin. I wasn’t going to try to shoot this. Sean Porter was brought on because he has a diversity of styles. He isn’t trying to put his imprint on a director’s film. He tries to translate what they’re going for. I saw It Felt Like Love and Kumiko: The Treasure Hunter, which are very different films, and I would never peg them as being shot by the same person. For that reason, I knew that he could translate the visuals as I would have.

I love following your career, Anton. Your role choices are interesting to me. I don’t know you, but from everything I’ve heard, you’re an incredibly intelligent person.
Anton: That’s debatable…[laughs]

I think you exude a keen intellect when you’re onscreen. Do you choose roles that allow you to display that?
Anton: The thought just crossed my mind that I should find someone really stupid to play. [laughs] I think at this point I want to be doing different kinds of characters and changing physicality…It’s hard, because movies don’t really come out in order. Sometimes they never come out. So work that [I] do that in my mind I’m plotting my…not so much career trajectory, but my creative trajectory…a lot of times, people don’t get to see that. Something that I may have done three years ago may come out tomorrow, and three years ago I was on that creative page, but I’m not anymore! You get judged by that moment. For me, at this point, I’m trying to figure out what I can do creatively. It’s about trying to find new things and trying to figure out voices and borrowing from things and learning as much as possible so that I have an archive of things to borrow from.

Jeremy: I can attest to the fact that he is an overthinker. He gave me a huge phone book of notes about his character, not to change the script, but just his insights and how he would steer the character, emotionally. That I loved. Anton has a very good idea of what he wants to do, and he wants to talk about it a lot. Sometimes I want to, you know…

Anton: Not talk about it. [laughs]

Jeremy: This film is so physical. The dialogue, if you look at it line by line…it’s like, what are we saying here? It’s all kind of throwaway. But when you see the character, he’s not very proactive. He’s forced to live or die. He’s not trying to be a cinematic movie hero. He’s forced into that role and has to go kind of full-gonzo to get there. It’s really fun to see it come alive on camera.

Anton, are you the kind of actor who needs to be riled up before a tense scene? This film is obviously full of them.
Anton: It’s just focus. I know Jeremy’s really busy, but I send him all of that stuff. It’s a selfish thing. I need what I’m thinking to come out into the world, even if it’s a two-word approval, like, “Yeah, I agree,” I need that approval so that in the morning I can get up and use that when I go to work. It’s a weird version of focusing. That being said, it’s not just me focusing. I was thinking a lot about Callum and [Imogen] and Alia and Joe, watching those guys. Patrick Stewart on the other side of the door. When you’re part of a cast like this, you’re fortunate enough to have people who are constantly informing what you’re doing.

It’s very touching for me to see Callum’s face when I get hurt [in the movie]. The empathy and kindness he was exuding in that moment aided me so much. I love that guy, weirdly. We’ve never had an experience like that in real life, you know what I mean? He’s a great guy, and we’re friends. But there was something about that…you share really intimate things with people [on movies] that you just wouldn’t, even if you’ve been friends with them for years. You don’t share the things you’re forced to share [on a movie set].

The big thing I was scared of was that [the cast] would get together as a band and dislike each other.

Jeremy: That wouldn’t have happened. That’s how I cast movies.

Anton: Well, I was still scared, but those guys are good dudes. They’re good people.

Jeremy: The environment we create is, every actor on set wants to be there. They were invested. When you have that chemistry, that mutual support…it becomes real. Everyone feeds off of each other. When you’re in the room, you’re at the mercy of every single performance. You cannot have one that’s off. That real-life energy, that charge, was palpable in every take.

What’s the message of the picture?
Jeremy: There are lots of layers there. There’s subtle political commentary in there. There’s a thesis to the movie, and that’s more about stripping down ideology and affiliation and who we think we are in labels. It’s about a learned aggression and violence…all sorts of shit. But really, it’s entertainment. It’s about good, old-fashioned escapist filmmaking. Drawing from my favorite experiences with Blue Ruin, which were derived from watching audiences respond to intention…that was so fucking exhilarating for me.

With Green Room, what I wanted to do was infuse an archive, my experience in the punk rock and hardcore scene. I wanted to have something to show for it. I wanted to make a genre film but infuse it with the energy of the hardcore punk scene, which I really loved and also defined my youth.

What are some new things the movie brings to the table as far as genre filmmaking?
Jeremy: I really try to not let specific genres influence me. I’m certainly collectively influenced by all of the films I’ve ever seen. I did watch Straw Dogs for a reference. I knew this plot wasn’t going to be very thick. Straw Dogs was about the experience and tension and tone. A very thin plot. This is the point of Green Room. We’re not going for a convoluted plot. Contrived plot twists, injected character conflict or love stories that just don’t belong…it’s this insane, visceral experience. It’s an overnight clusterfuck, and it’s terrifying. It’s designed to be the most tense film I could ever imagine.

I approached it as a war film. That’s what it was. It’s a siege scenario. It has aesthetic elements that could be attributed to the horror genre. Certainly a lot of graphic violence. The way I approached it with the production design and the actors was that it was a very grounded war film, but on the other side of the door, there are amateurs.

We’ve been talking a lot about actors.
Anton: What’s wrong with that? [laughs]

[laughs] Jeremy, is there a technique you have when working with your actors?
Jeremy: [To Anton] What is my technique? No, seriously. Do I have a technique? I don’t perceive myself as having a technique.

Anton: I think, when you watch Jeremy’s movies, there’s a real sensitivity to performance. There are two parts of me. There’s the really critical, film-nerd part of me that loves that, and then there’s the part of me where I’m like, “I really didn’t like that movie, but I want to work with that director because he loves actors.” I think you can see that in Jeremy’s films. I love Macon [Blair]. He’s such a good actor, you know? What a beautiful performance in Blue Ruin. I was geeking out on meeting him. But you see in Blue Ruin that there’s a real sensitivity to people’s performances, and that’s what it’s like on set.

I know that Jeremy was going through a lot of stuff that we had no idea about, actually. And I’d say, in a microcosm, that is your approach. We had no idea what Jeremy was dealing with outside of just trying to man this ship on the day, and it was really about being sensitive to what we were doing and trying to get the right moments. It’s a real love for performance that, as an actor, you appreciate. It’s giving you a chance to make stuff, and I think that is a way of working with actors. That is an approach. I’m sure there are directors who don’t like to work with actors and don’t know how to be sensitive to actors. The groundedness in these films comes from his sensitivity.

From their collected experiences around Hollywood, both screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker and animation director Chris Prynoski are familiar with the trappings of fame, as well as the desperation of those without it to attain it. Wearing a pair of outfits that Walker noted, “could combine for a really great Hunter S. Thompson costume,” the Nerdland creative team was at ease discussing the first feature film to emerge from animation house Titmouse, Inc. where Prynoski also helms Metalocalypse. Nerdland (read our review) takes a satirical look at a pair of ne’er do well Los Angeles roommates—aspiring actor John (Paul Rudd) and wanna’ be screenwriter Elliot (Patton Oswalt)—hung up on fantasies of making it big in the movies.

In their sit-down interview with Way Too Indie, Andrew Kevin Walker and Chris Prynoski discuss Nerdland‘s nihilistic vision of modern society, their shared appreciation for improv in moderation, and how the dream of writing the Great American novel has shifted.

What was the launching point for this story?

Andrew Kevin Walker: It was an original script I wrote and I tried in different ways to get it made. It was written to be live action – that was kind of the way I imagined it. It’s kind of loosely based on mine, and my best friend John’s life, trying to break into showbiz.

I tried to get it made as an animated TV show; I took the script and broke it down into smaller episodes then left it open-ended. Then when that didn’t happen because no one was interested, I broke it down into little five minute, bite-sized pieces that probably would have added up to one feature but they were made to be little internet shorts and that didn’t work out.

So I just regrouped again. I went back to the feature and I tightened it up. I had been watching and loving Metalocalypse and all the stuff that Titmouse, Inc. does. I’m wondering, “who are these geniuses? These mysterious weirdos who do all this amazing animation.” I managed through agents to get a meeting where I went with my script, they took a look at it, and it was a beautiful thing from there on.

Chris Prynoski: A lot of times you get these scripts and there’s a lot of work that has to be done, but this was very clear. I’ve been those people, I know those people, our studio exists in that neighborhood. It was very clear, I could see how this would worked and I was super stoked.

So the script you brought in to Titmouse was the feature version?

AKW: It was the feature version and that’s what we ended up doing. Fully independent, self-financed, sweat equity feature.

That’s despite Titmouse having not done a feature to that point?

CP: Yeah, we work on features. We do pre-production on features but our own movie that we have control over. We’ve done some direct-to-TV features but this was our first real feature that we had control over. I’m stoked, I’m really proud of it.

There’s a real nihilistic presentation to the world of these characters – is that your general perspective on society?

AKW: I think it’s exclusively about the entertainment industry and the kind of sweaty-palmed desperation you have when you’re outside looking in, trying to get in. I do think it’s interesting that in modern day society, fame can be this big (Andrew spreads his hands apart) like it always was, or fame can be this big (Andrew holds two fingers an inch away from one another). Small fame can become big fame and go back to small fame again then you really want another taste of that.

I don’t think there’s as many people looking to write the great American novel like there used to be, I think everyone’s either trying to write the great American screenplay or shoot the great American YouTube video. Looking in at Hollywood at this point is just kind of looking out at the world, in a way.

There’s a de-evolution in our popular entertainment that you can see through these characters aspirations – is that something concerning for either of you?

CP: I don’t know if it’s concerning as much as it is the way it is. It’s not like we’re trying to be like, “Hey, we’re making this important movie that’s going to change the way things work. If people just like watch this they’re going to have this revelation.” It’s more like, “Hey, this sucks, right?”

AKW: Yeah, isn’t this funny?

CP: This is the way we live. It’s funny, it’s weird. Society is obsessed with fame for fame’s sake.

AWK: Hopefully there’s a certain amount of recognition – especially for our peers. It does go beyond that now since everybody can be famous in their own way, in their smaller or larger social circle.

CP: Yeah you’ve got a phone. You can make your own YouTube video. Everybody’s got their own movie studio.

Andrew, a lot of your previous writing had been comedic but not quite so overtly comedic. You mentioned you had been working on this script for quite a while, was this your desire to do an out-and-out comedy?

AKW: I really do love comedy, I watch a lot of comedy. Humor comes into everything that you’re writing – no matter how serious or self-serious it is. I’ve written darker stuff that’s kind of balanced with comedy and this is almost a comedy that’s balanced with darkness.

Chris, when it comes to the character design, many of the characters have traditionally attractive features that get exaggerated in discomforting ways. What kind of calculation did you make to decide how far out the look of the world would be?

CP: Oh it was definitely a calculation because these days it’s kind of – in a weird way – easier to make stuff look beautiful and shiny and clean. With computers that’s the default. We made a conscious effort to make this very crunchy and rough around the edges. [Make it] feel like hand-drawn drawings. Not use a lot of the bag of tricks we use on other things like there’s no depth of field in this, there’s hardly any lighting on the characters – really just used in special circumstances – there’s not a lot of the, like, fancy stuff we use on other productions.

We really wanted to make this feel almost like films that were shot under an oxberry. You know, the production designer Antonio Canoobio, we really wanted to challenge ourselves by not going slick with it. It sounds kind of counter-intuitive.

That has its own appeal, too. It’s a distinctive look. People talk a lot about “the Adult Swin aesthetic” but it’s got its own distinctive style so it’s not so easy to just lump them all together.

CP: I think it’s more of a sensibility or a tone than an aesthetic with the Adult Swim stuff. I did the first character lineup but beyond that I pretty much handed the whole movie character-wise to Joe Bennett, who did most of the character designs. Obviously I had input on it but you see a lot of his hand there. He’s got a great mind for comedic detail. Little things you’ll notice on the characters that are really, really smart.

At what point did Paul Rudd and Patton Oswalt become involved and what did they help bring to Nerdland?

CP: Patton was the first actor of any of the actors to get involved. He had done voices for other cartoons and is a fan of Andy’s. He said yes in the room to it, which was great, and kind of had a cascade effect.

As far as stuff that those guys added… it’s interesting. The way I record, is you record the exact page, you do a loose pass and then you do an improv pass. These guys did so much incredible improve but what ended up in the film was really, largely, what the script was. There’s heightened parts where we used the imrpov but it’s all woven in to what’s there on the page.

AKW: Patton and Paul did amazing improv. Paul Scheer really stuck out to me. He was insanely amazing. Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome in a way had such thankless parts and they made a lot of very little. But every actor did improv in great ways.

I think Chris was very judicious in choosing a balance between improv keeping the flow moving forward. I think we’ve all seen improv where you see a piece of a film get caught in an improv bubble for a minute. You’re kind of there on the day with them, appreciating that moment, and it might be a little longer than maybe [necessary] and then things get started again. So I think [Chris] was kind of great in judging stuff and choosing it very thoughtfully.

CP: Yeah it’s so easy to get caught up when you’re in the booth recording with these guys making you laugh. It’s like, “That’s great! That’s genius!” Having done Metalocalypse it happens all the time. There’s so much more than we can use in any episode. You really, really have to work hard on focusing. Not falling in love with something that is not going to work or ultimately not work as well.

AKW: It’s almost like unless you were there on the day it’s not the same. It stops the movie for a second. But that’s what blooper reels and Blu-Ray extras are for.

At some point you have to kill your darlings.

AKW: Absolutely. Or the darling has to be the thing from the script that gets taken out, and the improv goes in its place.

CP: I got to say, too, the combination of Paul and Patton – they had such good chemistry together. You really felt that these guys knew each other very well, they lived together, they were roommates. These guy were recording on opposite coasts. They could hear each other and see each other on a screen but Paul was in New York and Patton was in LA.

They made these characters likable while they were riding a dangerous line where people could have just checked out and been like, “these guys are assholes and I’m not with them anymore.”

AKW: The most embarrassing thing for me… Every actor was bringing so much more to everything that was on the page. I would be the one laughing the hardest at my own stuff I had written. To hear Patton Oswalt’s voice saying these lines after all this time living with it on the page, and then Paul Rudd and on and on from top to bottom… there’s not a lot in here by an actor or actress you don’t know.

For Rudd and Oswalt particularly they’re not even altering their voices much, it’s a lot through their natural congeniality.

AKW: And also I think it’s selling the friendship between them. It lets you keep caring about them no matter what semi-despicable things they discuss doing and attempt to do.

Is there a future for the characters of Nerdland?

AKW: That will be determined out there rather than in this room but they certainly live in my heart.

CP: I’d love to work with Andy again on something, who knows.

AKW: We’re already trying to figure out what to be able to do next together. It was just the best experience ever.

Even actors Lindsay Burdge and Arthur Martinez have trouble separating what’s real and what’s fiction from their new movie Actor Martinez. A documentary-style film ostensibly about Arthur’s life as a Denver-area actor, the plot takes a meta-narrative twist when filmmakers Nathan Silver and Mike Ott interrupt the docudrama – in several scenes with the actors – to nudge the film in more interesting directions. “You would feel like you’re authoring something,” began Lindsay, “but it’s like—I honestly don’t know to what extent they were just manipulating me into thinking I was doing these things on my own. I just don’t know.”

Arthur, supposedly the initiating force behind the movie, often appears to be the biggest subject of the filmmakers’ manipulation. Or is he helping to pull the strings alongside Mike and Nathan? In this sit-down with Way Too Indie, Actor Martinez stars Lindsay Burdge and Arthur Martinez discuss the complex concept behind their new film, the freedom of working without rehearsal and the livewire aspect to its production.

Actor Martinez recently held its US premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution.

How did this project first come to you both?

Arthur: I was actually, inadvertently, one of the pitchers. I didn’t know what I was pitching for. I knew I was throwing, but I didn’t expect this weird curveball.

Lindsay: Nathan [Silver] and I had hung out at another film festival shortly before he pitched this to me. Then, we were in New York and he said, “We came up with this movie in Denver, we want to make it soon. Do you want to do it?” He said it was about a man, Arthur, and this woman falling in love. I was supposed to be a gardener or something like that and it was supposed to be a regular movie. Next thing I knew months had passed and I was sent this outline which was not that movie at all.

Arthur: Wow, you got an outline though.

Lindsay: You knew that [Laughs].

Arthur: That still blows my mind [Laughs].

Lindsay: I know! I got an outline and it said, “Arthur does this.” Then it says, “Lindsay Burdge, actress from New York, does this.” I was like, “Oh, this is not the movie that I thought we were making at all.”

Arthur: I still haven’t seen the outline. That’s why I’m amazed at what she’s saying. She’s told me this before and I still have a hard time believing it.

Once you actually got into the production phase, were you anticipating the extent to which this would blend between documentary and narrative? Were you caught off guard when you were actually filming?

Arthur: That whole film is me caught off guard. Yeah, no, they didn’t tell me anything. They went to extra pains to hide what was happening. They would hide me off set somewhere and have somebody guard me so I wouldn’t go look beforehand.

What’s it like going into that situation where you don’t have that safety harness—or a script—to guide you?

Arthur: My classical training got in the way. I had to throw it out. You just have to throw it out. So after the first three days, I figured just throw it out.

Lindsay: There was definitely an adjustment period. I definitely knew more than Arthur did, about how it was going to be this blended thing, but there were a couple layers that I didn’t know were going to be there. I knew I was going to be playing myself. I knew I was going to be playing this character, but then there were these other characters also that I didn’t know I was going to have to sort out.

So the first day was very stressful and the second day got a little less stressful and then it became fun once I understood the rules, but until I knew the rules of the game we were playing it was very stressful and uncomfortable. We didn’t have anything really to hold onto at first. There’s no script, there’s no character, and so we weren’t working on a scene together. It was more like manipulating each other [Laughs].

Arthur: She’s right. They used us as weapons against each other and I’m sorry about some of those things I had to say [Laughs].

Lindsay: You got me once. I was like, “Ah nice, they got me. The tables have turned. Fair enough.”

It sounds a lot like theater exercises, almost more so than the traditional narrative structure of film. Did you find it liberating at all?

Lindsay: Yes, I thought it was really fun. It became really fun for me.

Arthur: Yeah, it was always scary, but I’m down.

Lindsay: Sometimes you had fun, right?

Arthur: Well… yeah. I mean, there’s a reason I did this. It’s like riding a roller coaster, I’ve been screaming the whole time. It’s awesome.

Lindsay: But also, we were playing different games. We had different rules that we’re playing by. Because you were like, “I’m going to know nothing,” and I was like, “I gotta know something.”

Arthur: I don’t remember actually making that rule, I think that was [co-directors] Mike [Ott] and Nathan [Silver].

Lindsay: I remember saying to you, “Do you want me to sneak you the outline?” And you were like, “No no no.”

Arthur: Nah, you can’t mess with the director. Not on set.

It must take a lot of faith then to just throw yourself into that process and trust it.

Arthur: You trust the talent that you’re working for. It was a lot of pressure to make sure if they spent five hours setting up a shot that I actually did my job. Which is difficult when you don’t know what your job is, but that’s ok. You just do it. Hope for the best.

Lindsay: It was mostly just being. At least from watching you, it seemed like just being kind of open and available and reacting, which was cool to watch actually.

There’s a lot of tension though in some of those interactions. How much of that was authentic?

Arthur: You just defined acting. Serious, that’s the definition of acting and if it’s not, you’re not doing your job.

Lindsay: I think some of it was definitely real and some of it was manipulated. And I’m not sure Arthur still knows which is which [Laughs].

Arthur: I don’t know. I’m just going with it.

Lindsay: And I don’t either sometimes. Some of those times, I think we were recreating that tension or the tension was to swerve the plot of the movie, which there is actually a plot. Other times it was real frustration. It was fun kind of fun for me. Sometimes I felt like your advocate.

Arthur: Thank you, I did need that. It was brutal. They just beat up on me until she showed up. They’d got me so far off what I realized center was and she did a great deal to re-center me.

Lindsay: And also just to have somebody else say, “This is frustrating.”

It gave you a partner in the process.

Lindsay: Sometimes they would do this thing where they were like, “I don’t know, I’ve worked with a lot of different actors who don’t have a problem with this kind of work.” And I’m like, “Oh yeah? I know a lot of them, and they do.”

How much of what’s on the screen do you actually feel responsible for injecting into the narrative?

Arthur: This is like taking bunch of colors—everybody who worked on this—and swirling them all together. How much of that is me? I can’t even tell anymore, maybe none of it. Maybe some of it. I don’t know.

Lindsay: Did you even suggest shooting in your apartment?

Arthur: That was a resource, yes. That was the purpose of it. I didn’t know we were going to shoot what we shot.

Lindsay: I still don’t know what he’s… I don’t trust this guy.

Arthur: I don’t trust me either. It’s crazy.

Lindsay: I don’t how much of it is you… because I arrived and it was already underway.

Arthur: You’re right about that. I was part of the early production process, I just didn’t know what was coming out of it. I just made the decision to trust Mike and Nathan. Those guys are crazy.

Now that you’ve had the chance to see the final film, how closely did it resemble what you thought you were making?

Lindsay: Very closely for me.

Arthur: Ok, I’m down with that. It must have matched the outline at least.

Lindsay: It didn’t match the outline. The outline was four pages long and had almost nothing in it, but it matched what I felt like we were making while we were making it.

Are there any things from this experience, the looseness of it, that you maybe miss in other films that you make?

Arthur: I think they all should be different. They’re all very different experiences and that’s ok.

Lindsay: I feel like there definitely was a sort of livewire element to this because we had to be so on our toes and just ready to go with whatever came at us. Nothing ever became polished, which was really nice. Often we would do a scene and I’d be like, “So are gonna do that again?” And they’d be like, “No! We got it, that was great!” And I’m like, “We did it one time! Don’t you want to do it again? It’ll be better.” And they were just like, “No.”

I liked that. I like how fresh it was, and it would be interesting to think about how to bring that to other stuff. We had to be so quick on our feet. But I don’t know how you could bring that to something when you’ve read the whole script and you know exactly what you’re saying.

Is it wrong to think about this film as percentages? As 50% documentary, 50% fiction?

Lindsay: You’d probably be wrong if you tried to divide it. Even if we tried to divide it. I still don’t know how much Arthur knew what was going on all the time.

Arthur: She’s right, I was part of the initial production, but it was definitely different [by the end]. There’s no way to identify what’s real or not in the scene. I can say this part of the scene is real. I’m sure it would be like reading a story about yourself in a tabloid. In many ways, this is a tabloid film.

Sold, an adaptation of the Patricia McCormick novel of the same name, follows a Nepalese girl named Lakshmi (Niyar Saikia) who falls into a world of sex trafficking and abuse when she travels to India. She’s imprisoned in a brothel called Happiness House with several other children, watched over by their tyrannical brothel madam (Susmita Mukerjee). Life becomes a constant struggle as Lakshmi suffers the harrowing brutality of her dire situation, though she never gives up hope that, one day, she and her new companions will find freedom.

The film also stars Parambrata Chatterjee, Gillian Anderson and David Arquette.

A movie designed to raise awareness about the rampant child trafficking going on around the world, Sold will see a limited theatrical release this weekend, where audience members will be encouraged to bring the film to their hometown, college, high school, or private group. For more information, visit soldthemovie.com

We spoke to Mukerjee and director Jeffrey Brown in San Francisco, where the film is opening this weekend at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.

I’m interested in getting your input on this considering the film’s unique strategy to spread awareness. The movie market has started to squish, in a way, over the past several years. Blockbusters are doing well and small, independent pictures have more avenues to find an audience than ever before. But mid-sized productions are sort of going away or not doing so well at the box office. It’s an interesting time.
Jeffrey: It’s very interesting. It’s a very different world than ten years ago, five years ago. For us, the theatrical distribution of this film is a way for everyone to learn that they can bring our film to their community. Our film was really created as a weapon for change. You can watch it at the theater and bring it to your high school, your college campus, your faith-based community, and you can start using it as a fundraising tool. On our website, soldthemovie.com, you can learn about our partners and you can learn about the fund that we’re creating. We’re channeling money to survivors of trafficking. What we want to do is shine a light on child trafficking. Every year, 1.8 million kids—and I think that’s a massive underestimate—are trafficked every year.

I’m sure the research process was…well, I’m sure it was many things.
Jeffrey: We followed the same track as [Patricia McCormick,] the author of the book that we optioned and turned into a movie. We did the same research she did. We went to the same organizations and went to many beyond that as well to really understand the issue. We took our cast and crew into red light areas, and they had long, in-depth conversations with survivors.

Susmita: I went to the red light areas because I was playing the part of madam. I needed to see what it would be like to be in the head of a person like this who would so ruthlessly sell thirteen and twelve-year-old girls. It was a very difficult and dark journey. The perception of the brothel madam…it’s not what it is in the Bollywood movies. That’s very glittery…it wasn’t real. It was a very difficult thing to go through the head of such a woman. Meeting several of these women helped me connect to them. I was privy to very, very intimate stories. Not all of it was used in the film’s narrative, but to me, as a subtext, I could understand very clearly the kind of dark character I was playing.

It must have been something else entirely to step into the shoes of someone like that.
Susmita: It was so devastating. I watched a screening the other day…there’s a schism. I cannot feel that, oh, I did that particular scene that way. I don’t know who she is. It’s very overpowering. It’s something rancid. Decay. And yet, from this decay, a flower can be born. It can become so big that it destroys the darkness.

If somebody looks at this movie as a propaganda film…so be it. If to do propaganda is to be able to make a difference, so be it. Who says art has to be something intellectual, something where you just see visuals and soak into the beauty of the frames and feel happy? You’re not paying money just to be happy. If you want to be happy, go dance in the rain, soak in the sun.

Jeffrey: Our film is about a very heavy topic, and we spent a lot of time aesthetically figuring out how to tell the story in a way where people would be inspired to action and not overwhelmed and depressed. You can enjoy the movie as a piece of art but also be inspired to take action. We use all the tools a filmmaker has. There’s a Banksy quote I love. He says, “If Michaelangelo and Leonardo and DaVinci were alive today, they’d be making Avatar, not painting chapel ceilings.” He said, if you really want to change the world and not simply redecorate it, make movies. It’s democratic, and it’s the art form that will change the world.

I feel like our film is already doing that. We’ve literally built 20 schools in Nepal. Nepal had 5,000 schools destroyed in the earthquake. We built 20 with one showing of our film.

It sounds like the amount work you guys are doing is a pretty big sacrifice on your part.
Jeffrey: Susmita came on her own dime from Mumbai. Another actress came from London on her own dime. From L.A., New York. Everyone who’s worked on this film has been touched by meeting these kids, who have gone through this harrowing experience. We’re in the service of them. No kid should be treated as a commodity.

As you said, you want to inspire people with this film. I imagine making it inspiring was difficult considering the awful things we see and hear. It’s a challenging film, too.
Jeffrey: Structurally, I think it’s most similar to The Shawshank Redemption. An innocent is forced into a prison situation. The person who runs the prison is incredibly powerful and corrupt. The innocent person is helping others while trying to figure out how to get out of there. There are many movies about disenfranchised children. Imagine if Slumdog Millionaire had a social agenda. How powerful would that be? We could have gotten thousands of kids educated and out of the slums of India. Why aren’t we using the most powerful art form for good? For me, this is a massive experiment to see how much we can do to help kids.

Susmita, you said something that caught my ear. You mentioned that, if people think this is a propaganda film, then so be it. I think people have certain expectations of what a movie can and should be or do, and they don’t know what to do with movies that exist outside of their definition.
Susmita: It’s not just about that Friday on which a film releases and you’re counting how many people see it and how much money is coming in. This movie was not made for that. The director and producers were very clear from the outset that this movie is not about making them billions. It’s a tool of social change. It starts from your the heart, not your pocket.

Adapted from a short film that played at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014, Sleeping Giant quickly turned into a Canadian indie success story when it was selected to play at the Cannes Film Festival in the Critics’ Week sidebar. Several months later, Sleeping Giant finally came back home to have its North American Premiere at TIFF in September 2015.

The film takes place over the summer in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where teenager Adam (Jackson Martin) spends his summer vacation with his family. At the start of his trip, he befriends Nate (Nick Serino) and Riley (Reece Moffett), two cousins from the area living with their grandmother. It’s immediately apparent that the friendship between the three boys only makes sense in the context of this vacation, with Adam coming from a sheltered, upper-middle-class life, and Nate and Riley coming from a lower class background. As the summer continues, tensions rise between Adam, Nate and Riley until they tragically boil over.

It’s been said many times already, but Cividino has made an impressive directorial debut with Sleeping Giant. As someone who has made similar trips up north as a kid, it was surprising to see how accurate Cividino portrays that unique feeling of spending your days away from home as an adolescent. In advance of Sleeping Giant’s North American premiere at TIFF, I had the chance to talk to Andrew Cividino about his film. Read on for the full interview below, where Cividino talks about his personal connection to the film’s location, learning how to work with young, nonprofessional actors, his feelings on finally bringing the film home and much more.

Sleeping Giant is currently out in limited release in Toronto, Ontario from D Films.

I never thought of the trip up to Northern Ontario as a rite of passage for kids in Ontario until I saw your film. I did it, my parents did it…I’m assuming this film had to come from a personal place for you.

I grew up spending my summers on the shore of Lake Superior in the exact locations that the film is set in. Every year at the end of the school year [my family] would go up the day school ended, and we could come back on Labour Day. It was like that well into high school, until I had to get a job. I made friends up there that occupied a kind of a special place because we grew up together but separate from our other lives. I think it was a chance every summer to go up and, as your identities form, have this separate group of friends that you’re spending this intense amount of time with. But you’re free from all the expectations of whatever hat you’re trying to wear in your high school in Southern Ontario.

To have that kind of an unsupervised playground hanging out with friends over the summer, you’re really just left to your own devices. You’re in the middle of nowhere. All of the sorts of risks that are associated with living in a more urban setting aren’t there. You just have to come for dinner basically, and that’s about it. You’re free to roam and explore, and that was kind of the genesis for me, wanting to capture what it was like to spend those years up in that place.

Your film feels more about capturing a specific sense of time and place than focusing on a narrative.

I think tone was something that was very important to me from the genesis of the project. There’s something that I saw mirrored that’s inherent to the landscape up there. It’s beautiful, but it’s also foreboding. If you know Lake Superior well, you know that you never feel fully at ease because it’s called Thunder Bay for a reason. There are always storms that could be rolling in, and it’s like the ocean in how the waves will whip up out of nowhere. There was this tension between it being like a romantic postcard view of nature and something much more, if not menacing, certainly indifferent to your existence. I thought was really well mirrored with what adolescent boys are like, the kind of tumult, the lack of empathy and that energy.

I feel like the editing is vital to the film because you’re combining intimate shots of nature, but you’re getting bigger macro shots as well. How did you find that specific rhythm going back and forth between the two types of shots?

I think it was in our philosophy from shooting it on the outset that we wanted to capture the grand scope and the intimate details, from sweeping aerial vistas to fighting insects on bark, and to do the same thing with our characters. It was important to step back far enough with our visuals to get a sense of space and location. It totally affects your understanding of what this story is, what it’s like for these characters to be here, and to get a sense of how isolated they are. There’s something under the surface. Like I mentioned before, [there’s] this idea of the romantic, European version of nature as this inviting thing, and there’s this other side of it which is more nature as a state of chaos. I really wanted to play that duality, both in terms of nature and how we shot it close and wide, and mirroring that with the two sides of the human story.

I’m assuming you had to have a lot of patience while making this in order to capture some of those shots up close, like the insects fighting on the bark.

I think, more than patience, it was about an openness to what’s around you. To recognize that you may be shooting a scene, but if you happen to see two bugs fighting on the tree, you have to run across the island and get your crew, and have them understand that it’s important enough to run with the camera on their back and to stop everything to shoot it. On the day [of shooting] it sounds totally insane, but you need people who can bind to that understanding and philosophy. For instance, we wanted to do a lot of stuff with crayfish. I used crayfish in the short film. We spent a day and a half trying to catch crayfish, but it was not a good year for them. We caught one in total. We couldn’t do it, and we had to re-envision the material. On the other hand, the bugs fighting on the tree was something that was just noticed, and we were able to stop and pay attention and actually capture it.

Did that openness apply to the rest of the production?

The narrative was nailed down, but what happens within scenes, and certainly where scenes happen, was something we had to be very much open to because the weather would repel us from the island. We were constantly having to adapt and reorganize our schedule, but the real openness was within scenes. To be open to allowing the actors to bring their own voices, and being open to explore possibilities while making sure that we don’t get off track of the number of narrative threads and character arcs that have to come together.

How did you approach working with these young, nonprofessional actors?

I was fortunate to do the short and develop a strong relationship with Nick Serino and Reese Moffett. There was a familiarity there, and I learned a lot about working with younger actors. I think the biggest thing of all was casting people who felt close enough to the characters. Not necessarily in terms of the details of their lives, but in terms of their personalities. [It’s] finding those people, and then being willing to change your own understanding of your character to allow them to bring their own element to it. You’re not going to get amazing craft performances out of young actors who usually don’t have any experience, but if you set things up properly, you may have put yourself in a situation where they feel comfortable to bring themselves to that role, to lose themselves in that scene or moment, and to draw on their own experiences if you can find those relatable things. It was about making sure it was a collaboration, and for them bringing their own perspective to it was important.

I wanted to ask specifically about Jackson Martin who plays Adam, because his role is so pivotal.

Jack was the most experienced of the three actors going in. We cast him in a traditional casting session out of Southern Ontario.

Did you deliberately choose a more experienced actor for the role of Adam?

I deliberately wanted a professional actor to play the role of Adam because I felt that the character was going to have to shoulder a lot more of the burden in that way, especially in the earlier drafts of the story. And I also wanted to cast someone who would be a fish out of water. For the other boys, it was essential that they were up there naturally and that was their environment. But I wanted to bring somebody up who felt like this was not their natural habitat.

I did want to talk about the homoerotic aspect between Adam and Riley. What made you decide to put that in the film?

I didn’t want to make a standard love triangle specifically, but I wanted to make something that kind of explored the complexities of sexuality coming online in a person. To me, Adam is not somebody who is necessarily going to land at gay or straight or who knows where on that spectrum. He’s somebody whose sexuality is just coming online, and who has a great deal of…pressure. Not intentional pressure, but expectations around heteronormative behaviour from everybody. There’s nobody in the film that’s homophobic, but the entire world assumes heterosexuality of him. That makes his admiration for Riley confused with [his] affection for Taylor, who’s his female friend as well. All of these things create this intense confusion for him as he’s trying to find his way.

2015 has been pretty exciting for Toronto-based filmmakers. There’s you, Kazik Radwanski (How Heavy This Hammer), and Adam Garnet Jones (Fire Song) to name a few playing at TIFF this year. It feels like a whole new generation of Canadian filmmakers is finally arriving.

I feel like it’s an incredibly exciting time to be making films in Toronto. I feel like I’m part of a community of people who are making really incredible and unique pieces. We share crews, we support each other’s work, we’re inspired by each other’s films, yet the voices are all quite distinct at the same time. I’m not sure exactly why it’s happening right now. I’ve been told by others, and I certainly feel it myself, that it’s something that hasn’t happened in a while. It’s this generation of filmmakers poking through at the exact same time and getting this kind of international recognition. I don’t know what the common threads are, other than the fact that it’s like “by any means necessary.” We go out and we find stories that compel us, and we’re not going to be constrained by financial resources. I’m really excited about where it will go.

You’ve made a film that feels very specific to an experience for people in Ontario, yet this is the first time your film will screen for audiences in Canada. You’ve screened the film at Cannes and Karlovy Vary already. Have you been surprised by the reaction from international audiences, and what do you expect from audiences at TIFF once they see it?

I was really surprised by the international response to the film. I always felt that the location for the film was incredibly beautiful but worried that was always just because of my personal bias towards it. I was really surprised to see how much the setting seemed to speak to people strongly when the film premiered internationally, and it how seemed exotic to them in a way. The colloquialisms, the way the boys speak in the film is so regional in a way that I wondered if that could have ever registered internationally, and I couldn’t believe it fully could. So I’m really curious to bring the film home. I hope that it rings true to people. I hope that it’s more than nostalgia too, I hope that the story connects. I’m curious and a little bit anxious to see how it goes over at home because, for us, this is the home crowd. I’m hopeful and a little bit scared. [Laughs]

A version of this interview was originally published on September 7th, 2015, as part of our coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival.

Director Marc Abraham takes a unique approach to the musician biopic with I Saw the Light, a movie spanning the six music-filled, final years of Hank Williams’ life. Intertwining the country icon’s songs with his turbulent life experiences (revolving largely around his wife, Audrey, played by Elizabeth Olsen), the film focuses not on Williams’ artistry, but the events and environments the art was born out of. From his agonizing bout with spina bifida to his unfaithful marriage to his spiraling addiction to drugs and alcohol, Abraham covers the singer’s darkest days, which culminated with his death at the early age of 29 in 1953.

The film’s star is fan favorite Tom Hiddleston, who bears a striking resemblance to Williams and sings every note of the legendary songs we see onscreen. It’s a layered role with several shades of grey lurking beneath the surface, but the English actor came prepared, having spent long periods of time in Nashville with some of country music’s most respected artists, learning to sing in an accent far removed from his own. The work shows in his tortured performance, which is simultaneously tragic and celebratory of Williams’ spirit.

In San Francisco we spoke to Hiddleston and Abraham about I Saw the Light, which is in theaters now.

The opening shot really knocked me over.
Tom: What’s interesting about that shot is that we shot it very fast. Marc had actually given himself and me some time, generously, in the schedule. We had a very tight schedule. We shot 130 pages in 39 days. We had to move quickly. He had actually created a space in the schedule to make sure we had time to breathe so that we didn’t have to rush it. The opening is the first time that the audience will hear me sing, without musical accompaniment, and it’s a declaration of intent. Interestingly enough, after having created all that space and all that time, it didn’t take very long.

I think it was a brilliant and brave decision by Marc, and terrifying for me initially, to start the film with a very cinematic sequence that invites the audience to engage with the poetry of Hank Williams in a completely different way. They may come in expecting to hear “Hey Good Lookin’,” they may come in expecting to hear “Lovesick Blues.” They may come in expecting to see white fringe and cowboy hats and clichés of country music. What Marc did is, he said, “Here’s something else.”

Marc: As Tom said very eloquently, as he always does, it was a statement of intent. There are all these expectations, and a lot of people think they know Hank Williams’ music, but what they don’t understand is that he was one of the most important literary influences of the late 20th century because his poetry changed the way music was actually looked at. The lyrics were extraordinarily vulnerable for a man to be singing. “I’m so lonesome I could cry.” Men weren’t doing that. What I wanted to make sure was that people were hit smack-dab on the jaw with the beauty of his words. The way to do that, I thought, was to make it as unadorned as possible and create it out of space and out of time and, as Tom said, without horsecrap on the boots and the kind of hee-haw aspect people were kind of expecting.

The purpose of it was also to say, this is not an imitation of Hank Williams. This is not us trying to mimic him. This is our version, a portrait of a very important artist, a young man. We had the benefit of one of the world’s great cinematographers, Dante Spinotti. We shot it on a stage and we had painted a giant black circle and hung black all around it with a ton of smoke. We put a stool in the middle of it and asked Mr. Hiddleston to come on out. He came on out, he sat on that stool, we floated those cameras, and Tom, as Hank, was about as naked as you can be. We wanted to let people know right off, this is how naked we’re prepared to go, this is how it’s going to sound, this is who this man is, and he’s doing his own singing.

The movie’s not about Hank writing songs. The songs are almost like punctuation. I think that’s an interesting approach.
Marc: I love that you say that. I have never cared for watching movies where artists are doing their painting or typing at the typewriter and tearing the [paper] out, other than maybe The Shining. That’s not something that I even know how to do. Nor was I interested in any of the psychological explanations for why Hank Williams became Hank Williams. He was a poor kid from Alabama. Why he became who he was and how he had that inside of him…you could get Sigmund Freud, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard…they could all spend time trying to figure it out. I doubt anybody could answer that question. What we wanted to do was show an artist as a young man. Not the roots of his psychoanalysis but the cultural environment and personal environment, which is where the fertilizer was.

That’s, in fact, how Tom and I ended up working together. People think he probably played the guitar for me and I sat back, scratching my jaw, and thought, “Well, can he be Hank Williams?” You know how we did it? We talked about what movie we wanted to make. He and I, who had gotten to know each other over a very lengthy period of time; what did we actually want to do?

Tom: Marc drew together the music with the marriage and the man. The placement of the music…What I’d hoped people would see was that these songs came out of his experiences. That’s the other thing: These songs and this film are about a man who loved women. Every song you could listen to that Hank wrote is about women. It’s about falling out of love, being in the doghouse, loneliness, separation from women.

“Why don’t you love me like you used to do/why can’t I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart.”

“You’re cheatin’ heart will make you weep/you’ll cry and cry and try to sleep.”

“You’re my gal and I’m your fella/you dress up in your frock of yella/you’ll look swell and I’ll look swell/setting the woods on fire.”

This is a guy with a huge love of women. His whole career was about flirtation and sexuality. I think what was so brilliant about Marc’s script is that he really drew that together, the songs and Hank’s relationship with women. It’s very telling that the majority of characters in the film, apart from Hank Williams, are women. And they’re played by women: Elizabeth Olsen, Cherry Jones, Maddie Hasson, Wrenn Schmidt. Those were the major figures in his life. That was the fascinating central thesis of the screenplay. The way the songs

The way the songs were dispersed, as you say, was like punctuation and expressive of other things in Hank’s life. I suppose the best example of that is at the end of the end of the film when I sing “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” He’s not long for this world at that point. Is he singing to himself? I think so. Probably. I think he’s singing about regret. But he could also be singing to Audrey.

So…I’m kind of a failed country musician. [laughs]
Tom: [laughs] That was the last thing I expected to come out of your mouth.

It’s true! I tried to play country music for years, but I’m from [California] and I don’t have the accent to sing that kind of music.
Tom: I don’t either!

But you have license to adopt it because you’re an actor. That’s an incredible opportunity. I’m so jealous. In your research, you got to spend time with Rodney Crowell! That’s amazing!
Tom: Yeah, it’s amazing. And not just Rodney, but everybody he knows, everyone who was open to working with me. The generosity of spirit shown to me by the musicians I met in Nashville is something I’ll never forget. Within three days, I was in Ray Kennedy’s studio, recording music on the same equipment Hank recorded on, standing around a single microphone with Richard Bennett, Chris Scruggs, Rodney Crowell, Wes Langlois…These guys have been making this music for years, and they were just jamming. To sing my first cover of “Lovesick Blues” with them and the band is an insane privilege. You’re absolutely right: a gift.

When some people try to sing country, it sounds fake. I should know. [laughs] It’s almost like a caricature. You really have to connect with the lyric. You can tell that you get the emotion behind Hank’s lyrics.
Tom: That all came from Rodney, in a way. I didn’t know where to start. He said, “You have to find out what these songs mean to you. There’s no way you’re going to transmit the power of these songs if you don’t invest yourself inside them.” It’s got to be real. I love the challenge of that; it is an acting challenge. It’s a challenge of interpretation. Whenever you take on a big acting role, you’re interpreting that character’s emotional truth and filling it with your own. The same is true of these songs. When I was singing “Move It On Over,” that’s my mischief, my rebellion. When I’m singing “Cold, Cold Heart,” that’s my sadness. It’s filtered through the prism of Hank, but really, it’s me. Has to be.

There’s something special about Elizabeth that I can’t put my finger on. What is it?
Marc: She has a bearing beyond her years. She’s 26 years old or something, but she has a weight to her that’s undeniable. That’s something that’s genetically inside her. I personally feel that the thing she brings to Audrey that is just so essential is that she’s a keenly intelligent woman who doesn’t really suffer fools or foolishness much. Because of that, she invested Audrey with a sense of intelligence. She took a character who is easily dismissed as being a shrew, a bitch, a difficult person, Yoko breaking up the Beatles…because of her bearing of intelligence, when she performs and you see her with Hank, you come away with, “You know what? You think I’m an asshole? You think I’m a bitch? You try living with this guy.”

Tom: She’s very honest. I suppose it’s best illustrated by describing the opposite. I’ve worked opposite actors who are immaculate in delivering what they’ve prepared, and sometimes they don’t have the life experience to represent the particular emotional truth. So they reach for an idea of what they think that is. Lizzy is incapable of falsity in her acting. She has extraordinary integrity. The choices she makes are very instinctive. When you’re acting opposite Lizzy, you’re acting opposite a real person. The magic of the scene comes from the rally you play with each other. That’s when acting’s fun, to be honest. When you’re doing preparation, that’s a solitary activity. When you’re reading a script, that’s a solitary activity. There’s so much about acting that is, necessarily, a solitary activity. But when you’re on set with your scene partner, the beauty of it is that you take the leap together. You don’t really know where the scene is going to go, and if you’re working with someone really good, as she is, what you have to do is listen.

This is kind of an impossible question, but I’m going to ask you both anyway. You’ve spent so much time getting to know Hank Williams and the man he was. In your opinion, what was his greatest fear?
Marc: This is not to diminish the question, but there is no possible way I can give you a sense of what his greatest fear was. I can tell you that he was incredibly vulnerable. What he wrote was undeniably vulnerable. That’s what he was telling us. I know those are feelings that he must have had. I have no idea what his greatest fear was. You could surmise that one of the things that he most wished had happened in his life was that he had a daddy.

Tom: I can tell you a number of things I don’t think he feared. He didn’t fear death. I don’t think he feared any one person…he wasn’t afraid of people. Maybe his greatest fear was of losing himself, somehow diverting from his own integrity. That there were people who would try to reshape him or change who he was, smooth out his rough edges so that he would stop being him.

Tom, you’re so generous with your fans, me included. We see stuff about you on the Internet and it just makes our day. It makes us smile.
Tom: Thanks, buddy.

It’s great! Thank you. We appreciate it.
Tom: I love what I do. I really love it. And I wouldn’t get to do that without an audience to watch it. There is no such thing as acting in a vacuum. I started in the theater, and I learned that the audience is an integral part of the conversation. I came from the audience. When I became an actor, I just wanted to become a part of the conversation in the way actors I admire contributed to it. Bruce Springsteen said that his life’s work is a conversation. I’m flattered that if I have any fans, they follow my curiosity into wherever my work takes me. I don’t take that for granted. There are people who are willing to pay money to see my work. I wouldn’t be allowed to do what I do without that, so I have enormous gratitude. It’s still a source of constant surprise and delight that I have fans at all.

Some fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are so starved for advance information about the stories you’re telling with those movies.
Tom: I am still so surprised and grateful that I’m allowed to make a living doing what I do. I have loved cinema and theater for as long as I can remember for in all its variety and diversity. The idea that I get to be a part of it is extraordinary to me. But even as much as I’ve loved it, I love to be surprised by it. I don’t want to know too much about a film before I watch it. I might see a trailer, but I don’t want to see articles about it, I don’t want to read reviews about it, I don’t want to know what happens to the main character. I don’t want spoilers. I want to be surprised.

I just worked with Bill Corso, who was the makeup head on Star Wars: The Force Awakens. We were working together for three months. He had so many stories he could have told me. But in the makeup bus it was banned. We just didn’t go there. I didn’t want to know what happened to Han Solo. If I had found out, I would have strangled him! He’s Harrison Ford’s makeup artist and he could have told me that in a second, but he was so respectful.

Listen, this is really getting to the heart of the matter. You’re sitting in the theater and you hear the opening fanfare. Maybe it’s the letters of Universal spinning around a globe, maybe it’s 20th Century Fox. It’s the flickering Marvel logo, the Lucasfilm thing. A drama teacher told me this once when I was training: The audience’s capacity for delight at that moment when the lights dim and the music starts is at one hundred percent. There’s an absolutely palpable electricity in the air. If you know what’s going to happen [in the movie beforehand], it’s all over! All I’m trying to do is keep the magic of that expectation alive. I understand the enthusiasm, I understand the curiosity. Unfortunately, my mother and father raised me with some self-discipline, so you won’t get those secrets out of me!

In a short amount of time, Mike Flanagan has become one of the most prolific directors working in horror today. After releasing his micro-budget debut feature Absentia in 2011, he followed it up with Oculus in 2013, which went on to get a wide theatrical release. Since then, Flanagan has been hard at work, and he now has not one, not two, but three films slated to come out this year: his passion project Before I Wake, the sequel to the 2014 genre hit Ouija, and Hush, a slick, low-budget horror film he made in secret. In fact, no one even knew of its existence until editing was completed.

The reason for Hush’s secrecy has to do with its approach, which some might consider radical for a horror film aimed towards mainstream audiences. The film takes place over one night at the secluded home of Maddie (Kate Siegel), a deaf-mute author working on her latest novel. Her house is a gorgeous cabin in the woods, but she soon finds herself trapped when a serial killer (John Gallagher Jr.) shows up at her door hoping to make her his next victim. Because Maddie can’t speak the majority of Hush has no dialogue, and the film plays out as a wordless game of cat and mouse between Maddie and her stalker.

With a slim runtime and minimal plot, Hush is a lean, effective, and fun little horror movie. Fans of home invasion films like The Strangers will find plenty to enjoy here, with Flanagan’s efficient direction and editing keeping the tension up thanks to the incredibly tight screenplay (written by both Flanagan and Siegel). In advance of its worldwide release on Netflix, I spoke to Mike Flanagan and Kate Siegel about why the film’s production was so secretive, the challenges of doing a film with little dialogue, and why we should all be excited for Ouija 2.

Hush comes out Friday, April 8th on Netflix.

This film appeared to have come out of nowhere. How did the ball get rolling on this production?

Mike: [Kate and I] had gone out to dinner and were talking about movies we really liked, and the kinds of movies that we wanted to make. We both talked about our mutual admiration for Wait Until Dark and high concept thrillers like that. For years, I’ve wanted to do a movie without dialogue, or mostly without dialogue because I thought it would be a really cool challenge. So we had pretty much figured out what we wanted to do with this at that meal, like before dessert showed up.

I then went to [producers] Jason Blum and Trevor Macy who I had worked with before and pitched them. I said I really want to do this but I think it could be really awesome or it could be a disaster and they kind of agreed. They were nervous about it, so we didn’t tell anybody about it because we didn’t know how it was going come out. If we did kind of announce the movie early, there was a fear that a studio would want to get involved, and they would show up and start messing with it. They’d be like, “Does she have to be deaf?” or “Can’t there be some dialogue throughout this middle section?”

Kate: Or “Can everyone be a teenager?”

Mike: You never know how many different ways this can go bad, so that was another reason why we didn’t want to tell anybody about it. So we wrote the movie in secret, and we shot it without telling anybody what we were doing. We shot it really fast, a three-week shoot, cut it really quickly back in LA, and then looked at the film and said: “I think this is working, now we can start telling people about it!”

This feels like a little bit of a departure compared to Absentia and Oculus. Those films dealt with characters pitted against supernatural forces, but this film is grounded in reality. What made you want to go down this route for your next film?

Mike: I’m certainly not eager to repeat myself as a rule, and I thought this film was going to be a challenge for me on a number of levels. Even just removing dialogue takes away half of your storytelling tools, and I love the pressure of that. For me, it’s about character and suspense, and I think that can be achieved with or without supernatural elements. So there was nothing about it that felt like a departure for me, except for the dialogue angle. That felt like the biggest stretch to me, especially since my earlier movies were, like, 95% dialogue. Letting go of that crutch was really exciting, but also really scary. And I know it’s really tough for Kate too because that’s kind of half of your toolkit as an actor. She was going through the same thing I was.

Kate: At the first glance you think “Great! I don’t have to learn any lines,” but once you get in the intense circumstances, you realize that you can’t make any noise. And you can’t listen, which is what acting really is about. It took away these two things that are the majority of acting. It was very frustrating, but they say when you put a lot of restrictions on creativity often times it will grow to fit the space. You ever see those square watermelons that will grow in a box? It was a lot like that, where at first it was like “This is so uncomfortable!” but then when I watched the movie it ends up feeling like it really pushed my limits in a way that feels successful.

Did you always see yourself playing Maddie?

Kate: Yeah. In the writing stage, I was making jokes like “I don’t want to learn any lines. I hate hearing myself talk on camera,” and whatever insecure, accurate things were coming out of me at the moment. And so because it was such a private, secret project, part of it was, “If we keep this under a certain budget and under the radar then I can probably play Maddie.” One of the thoughts was that, if the studio got their hands on it, then the very first thing they would have done is replace me. I had the support of Mike, Jason, and Trevor in my performance, so they kind of protected me from the Hollywood machine who would have given this role to…

Mike: They would have quadrupled the budget and tried to bring in somebody with a certain amount of foreign sales value.

Kate: I’ll always be grateful for Jason and Trevor for supporting me in the face of people who asked them to do that.

Because there’s no dialogue, you also need to have much more physicality in front of the camera with your performance.

Kate: There were things I loved about it and things that were very frustrating. I learned a lot about acting in the course of this whole movie. With Maddie, who isolates herself and is isolated from the world, you would think that would cause her to be closed in. But there’s something about sign language that is so communicative with the body that kept her so open to the camera. I developed a real intimacy with the camera because it was the only thing I could really listen to and focus on. So where I think there was a certain amount of trepidation and fear in my earlier work about the camera who sees deep in your soul, that’s right in your face in your emotional world, through Hush I learned how to make the camera my best observer and my most trusting friend. That’s something I will take into future projects, knowing that the camera is there to support and trust as opposed to judge and watch.

This is such a lean movie, there’s no fat whatsoever. How important was it in the writing stage to structure things?

Mike: Very important, especially for a movie like this. Our initial outline had it beaten down almost by the minute, where we were like “We know we need the sliding glass door to open by minute 15.” It’s an 83-page script, it’s pretty much a page a minute of a very dense, very weird read. Kate said it reads like a novella more than a script.

Kate: Because you’re getting a lot of internal cues about how the characters are feeling, a lot of cues about what the house looks like, and what you’re seeing at any given moment, which generally speaking you don’t do in a script.

Mike: For this we had to choreograph it on the page. We had to have the layout of the house on the page, [because] we needed to know that house intimately while we were writing.

Kate: As my first feature script it was a boot camp. There’s no room for full dialogue scenes or a lot of exposition to eat up some time before the killer shows up. It was throwing me into the deep end and being like “these are the bones of how you make a narrative story,” and Mike was really generous with his knowledge.

Mike: There’s this thing that happens all the time with young writers where you overwrite dialogue. It’s because you want to get these story points out, but you want it to be conversational. And almost without fail, you can identify a young writer based on how much dialogue they put into the script, how circular the conversations are, and how long it takes to get to the relevant information. The more experienced a writer is, the less important it is to focus on the conversation and the more important it is to get the information out in the most efficient, artistic way possible. And with a script like this it couldn’t really be overwritten, so there was no opportunity for that. This was all about choreography and sound design, which was also scripted. There’s a ton of information about what we wanted the sound design to be in the script.

Kate: The other dialogue scene came in about draft two or three, where we really needed to step away from Maddie for a second.

Did earlier iterations of the script have no dialogue whatsoever?

Mike: There was something really attractive right away about doing a movie with no dialogue. I thought that would have been so fun.

Kate: And in black and white.

Mike: Yeah! We did talk about a black and white version of this.

Kate: We started so artsy.

Mike: It turned out that having no dialogue is not really feasible.

Kate: Or fun to watch. It’s interesting artistically but it’s not exciting.

Mike: There was certain information about who Maddie was and about her situation that, we realized early on, someone needed to say. It would take us five or six pages to get that information out using strictly visual cues, and we just needed someone to say it to set the table so we could pull the dialogue out and let the tension of the movie play out.

Kate: It’s also super cool because part of what Maddie’s deafness and muteness does is bring you into her perspective, and why it’s so specifically terrifying to have this happen to her. And so let’s say when [the other dialogue scene] shows up 60 minutes in, it’s such a weird feeling, and the reason it feels weird is because we haven’t heard anybody talk for about 40 minutes. I love that because it is weird, and when we cut back to Maddie you’re more familiar with what she’s missing out on.

Mike, you edit all of your films. Tell me about your editing process.

Mike: It’s pretty much the same on all of them. I get dailies on set and I’ve got Avid Media Composer on my laptop, so I will do rough cuts and assemblies on set at the monitor in between set ups. I tend to construct the coverage for a scene based on what I need for an edit. There’s really nothing else. I’ve heard my assistant editors describe my footage when it comes in as being like Ikea furniture, in that everything fits together in a specific way and there’s nothing left over. That can be really scary to me, and to a studio in particular because they look at it and say there’s no option to change this. It kind of is what it is, which is one of the only ways you can accomplish [shooting] a movie like Hush in 18 days. It has to be very specific and surgical.

I’m really lucky that they let me keep editing my stuff. It doesn’t happen for everybody, and it almost didn’t happen for me. They weren’t going to let me edit Oculus at first, and I had to actually show them what I wanted to do with it because the editor they hired wasn’t getting it. He was having that Ikea furniture panic where he was saying “I don’t see how this fits.” I had to sit down and actually edit and show them how it works, and they let me do it. But yeah, I think the writing process and everything I do on set are designed to serve me as an editor.

This is a crazy year for you, with three of your movies coming out in 2016. Tell me about Ouija 2, because I was surprised when I heard you were working on a franchise film.

Mike: Everybody was. I was. The thing with Ouija 2 was, it’s through Blumhouse, and I’ve worked with those guys a bunch now. So when they first brought it up to me, my gut reaction was “No way.” Then they said I can do whatever I want and I said, “Really?” I didn’t believe it, so I kind of tentatively moved forward with it, feeling like at any moment they would swoop in and stop me from doing what I wanted to do and then I could just gracefully step away from the movie. But it was irresistible, this idea that I could just do whatever.

So I got to do something really cool that I can’t talk about too much, although I know Blum and everyone’s so happy with the movie they’re going to be screening it for critics well before the release, which is really surprising. We got to do something really unique and unexpected. I think you can pretty much let go of the first movie. Mike Fimognari, who’s been kind of my regular DP, and I got to do things visually on this movie that we never thought we could get away with. So it’s actually a pretty cool and ambitious little movie that I think is hopefully going to really surprise people and defy the expectations that the first movie established.

In Neon Bull, writer/director Gabriel Mascaro takes viewers to a familiar yet strange world in northeastern Brazil. The film hones in on the Vaquejada rodeo, an event in the area where cowboys drag a bull to the ground by grabbing its tail. It’s a popular event throughout the region, and one Mascaro has a familiarity with. “I come from Recife, and at the school I studied at as a teenager there was a lot of influence about Vaquejada,” he explains, before talking about attending a Vaquejada party when he was 15 years old. “I never thought that, 15 years later, I would be making a movie about them.”

But Neon Bull doesn’t keep its focus on the rodeo events themselves, although the performance sequences provide some of the film’s best moments. Mascaro focuses on a small group of Vaquieros, people who work behind the scenes transporting bulls to each stop on the rodeo’s tour and making sure each event goes off without a hitch. The group’s makeshift leader is Iremar (Juliano Cazarré), the main Vaquiero who’s a pro at his job, and Mascaro observes Iremar and his coworkers as they deal with their daily existence both at work and within their surrounding environment.

Beyond his personal connection, Mascaro’s interest in making a film about the Vaquejada rodeo had to do with the link between the film’s subject matter and location. “When I started thinking about Vaquejadas as an environment to translate into a movie, I had the opportunity to meet a cattle rancher that also worked part-time in the textile industry,” Mascaro recalls, a piece of information he eventually used as the basis for Iremar’s character. The textile industry’s success in the region is one thing Mascaro cites as evidence of significant changes happening in his country. “Vaquejadas work as the scenery for a lot of the transformations that Brazil has been having for the last ten years, a lot of social and economic transformations.” And while the film is never explicit in laying out the political and economic changes going on in the background, it dominates what goes on in a film Mascaro describes as being about “a body in a transformational environment.”

That idea of transformation also applies to transforming preconceptions about gender norms. “The movie is very interested in the concept of a body,” Mascaro says. “It’s not fixed to a specific gender.” Neon Bull repeatedly finds ways to subvert the sorts of expectations one might make when watching a film about such an aggressive and masculine setting. Iremar is a strong, hulking presence when working as a Vaquiero but in his downtime, he pursues his dream of becoming a fashion designer, sewing clothes in a nearby textile factory. And partway through the film, Mascaro brings in a new character named Junior (Vinicius de Oliveira), whose slim body and long hair stand out when compared to the muscular rodeo workers around him.

Mascaro believes that, in order to break stereotypes involving masculinity and gender roles, the camera’s placement needs to be taken into account. “One of the central issues for me in regards to moviemaking is the relationship between the distance of the camera to the object being filmed. If the camera is too close, it might reinforce too much of a stereotype. If it’s far away, it might break the stereotype. You empower much more if you’re far away, with a full frame of the body. So I tried to translate this into a dance or choreography of the body into this transformational environment.”

The film does largely unfold through long, uninterrupted takes filmed with the camera at a distance, a choice that also gives Neon Bull a naturalistic, almost documentary-like appearance. Mascaro, who has a background in documentary filmmaking, and cinematographer Diego Garcia (who also worked as DoP on Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour) use their style to help normalize some of the film’s more surreal or provocative moments, whether they’re aesthetic (the neon-drenched rodeo sequences) or explicit (a graphic sex scene between Iremar and a pregnant woman). This is a deliberate choice on Mascaro’s part, explaining that “even surrealism is within the context of a spectacle, a show, and that’s how it becomes naturalism.”

The other big contributor to the film’s natural mood comes from the cast, an ensemble made up of professional and non-professional actors. “We worked with Fatima Toledo, who did actor preparation for City of God as well, to break barriers between formal actors and non-actors and bring them to a common level so there’s no tension.” A lack of tension seems important for a film shoot like this, given the lengthy and well-choreographed sequences throughout. Mascaro says there was “a lot of work involved,” especially with sequences like Iremar urinating in front of the camera, a shot that took eight hours to complete in order to achieve the correct camera movement, along with Cazarré being required to piss on cue. But the biggest challenge was a scene where Cazarré had to masturbate a horse, a situation that Mascaro laughs about today. “[Cazarré] said ‘No way, you’re pushing the limits, I’m not gonna do this unless you do it first.’ So I did.”

This interview was conducted in September 2015 during the Toronto International Film Festival. Special thanks to translator Daniel Galvao.

Like his 2011 film Take Shelter, Jeff Nichols‘ Midnight Special was born out of fear, specifically the fear of losing his son.

“I think, really, we’re terrified of losing them, so we’re going to try to figure out who they are to try to help them. Help them become the ones who manifest their own destiny,” the director told me during an interview I conducted a couple of weeks back. That fatherly fear is at the core of the film, though the story blossoms into something much bigger, touching on themes of friendship, homeland security, science, and religion, all in the mode of a sci-fi thriller.

Michael Shannon stars as a man escorting his supernaturally gifted son to a secret location, all while evading an armed religious sect and U.S. military forces. Aiding them on their journey is an old friend (Joel Edgerton) and the boy’s mother (Kirsten Dunst); a government scientist (Adam Driver), meanwhile, tries to understand the family’s plight as he tracks their location.

Terrifically thrilling and deeply affecting, Midnight Special is yet another showcase by one of this generation’s very best visual storytellers and opens in theaters this weekend.

Some people consider your movies to be vague or overly ambiguous. That’s maybe the biggest criticism levied against you.
It’s funny how everybody wants to be polite. Obviously, I made the film with an open ending on purpose. It’s like, let’s talk about it! If you don’t like it…maybe, rather than just being entrenched in your position, if we talk about it, you might be illuminated on something. It was funny, I had a good conversation with a lady in Berlin about [the movie]. She had a very specific place where she thought I should end the movie. She was very specific about not liking the end of the movie, and I said, “That’s cool. Where would you end the movie?” She told me, and I thought, that would be a terrible ending! She was like, “Well, it’s right. That’s where you should have ended it.” I was like, I really don’t think you’re right! I didn’t convince her, but it was at least fun to have a conversation.

So you do enjoy those conversations.
I do, yeah.

I do, too. If I meet a filmmaker and I didn’t like their movie, maybe, and I get illuminated by their insight…I love that.
The reality is, making movies is really complex. It’s a strange algebra. There are so many variables that go into them. I would be shocked if you met a filmmaker who said, “My film’s perfect,” you know? I don’t know if I want to be friends with that person.

Tommy Wiseau.
[laughs] It goes beyond ego. I want these films to be conversation starters, so of course it makes sense that I would want to have conversations about them. As long as people don’t ask me too many specifics about things. It’s cool to see how people’s minds work on them and work on the problems I created. It’s cool to hear how people interpret things, sometimes random, sometimes spot-on, sometimes differently. It’s fun.

In some ways, this movie is like the Superman movie I always wanted in terms of tone and taste, do you know what I mean?
I do.

The existential crisis of Superman is something that’s seldom handled well.
That’s very interesting. I think Zack Snyder scratched the surface of it. I think someone—maybe it was JJ Abrams—was talking about [doing] a Superman film and he was like, “I just wonder how he didn’t kill anybody as a baby.” I know that there are other people who have takes on it. I never saw this character as a superhero—I just saw him as a boy. His illnesses I just thought of as being organic, even though they’re supernatural. The same thing happened with

The same thing happened with Take Shelter. To your comment, specifically—wanting to see a certain version of a kind of movie…This is going to sound ridiculous, but Take Shelter was kind of my zombie movie. Take Shelter was my take on all those cool feelings in a zombie film where people are preparing for a disaster or preparing for the zombie stuff. I just wanted to make a movie that lived in that part. Then you start to make it deeper and more meaningful and relate it to your life, but that was very much the case with Take Shelter and here [with Midnight Special] too. I really liked those movies of the ’80s and sci-fi movies from that period. I kind of wanted to live in that world for a little bit, which doesn’t negate, though, my approach to the story or how I broaden its veins into my own life. It doesn’t discount that feeling, that sense you get after having seen stuff like that. I felt that way with Mud, too. I had this notion of what a classic American film was. I couldn’t tell you one specifically, but I can tell you a combination of several. Cool Hand Luke, The Getaway…I kind of wanted it to feel like some of the things I felt during those movies.

Midnight Special applies to that. So many people try to make these one-to-one analogies with these films, especially with the endings and other things. Those are kind of lost on me. That’s not how I thought about them. I just thought about the essence of those films.

Hitchcock’s movies were driven by his personal fears. Would you say you’re the same?
Absolutely. One hundred percent. The interesting thing about Hitchcock is that he chose fear as a predominant format to work in, which makes sense because that’s best for directors.

How so?
The feeling of fear is most directly linked to the toolbox that a director has to work with. This shot plus this shot equals this feeling. This music here, this framing here. I’m not going to give you much lead space in front of your eyes, and that’s going to freak people out. It’s different in comedy or drama…they’re not really genres. They’re these feelings. Fear most directly relates most to what a director does. I approach it a little differently. Definitely in Take Shelter, there are some scary moments, and they’re intended to be scary. I was getting to use that toolbox. I approach fear more from the standpoint of a writer. I use fear as a catalyst. Fear makes for a scary scene—“This is going to be a scary moment”—that’s what I’m talking about with Hitchcock. What I’m talking about as a writer…fear is a catalyst for a bigger idea. It’s a catalyst for the thought that you’re trying to convey to the audience, which for me is always an emotion—it’s not a story. It’s not plot. It’s not, “I’m going to tell you a story about what happened to a guy.” It’s, “I’m going to tell you a story about how a guy feels.”

Fear is a great place to start from. Fear is what motivates us as humans to get out and gather the food and build the shelter. It’s like a foundational element of humanity. But fear is only a catalyst. For instance, this film is about the fear of losing my son. That brings up a lot of emotions and other things, but that’s not a thought in and of itself. I can’t just make a movie about a guy afraid of losing his son. What does he do with that? What’s he trying to do with that fear? I think that forced me to think about the actual nature of parenthood. What are we trying to do? We’re trying to, I think, define for ourselves who our children are, in the purest way we possibly can. Sometimes, our own point of view gets in the way and we project that onto our kids. But I think, really, we’re terrified of losing them, so we’re going to try to figure out who they are to try to help them. Help them become the ones who manifest their own destiny. We have no control over that destiny. We have no control over who they become. At best, we can try to help them realize who they are and help them become that.

That became a thought. Fear produced that thought, which became the backbone for this movie. In Take Shelter, I was afraid of the world falling apart. I was afraid of not being a good provider for my family, or an adult, or a good husband. I was afraid of all those things, and there was a bunch of anxiety that came from that. But that’s not what that movie’s about—that movie’s about communicating in marriage. That movie’s about the foundational principles of marriage, which I think is communication. That’s why I made the daughter deaf. I think, in order to get that, I needed to have fear. Shotgun Stories is about the fear of losing one of my brothers. But ultimately that’s not what the movie’s about. It’s about the fruitlessness of revenge, a revenge that was born out of that fear.

I think there’s a huge misunderstanding among moviegoers in this country. People are obsessed with plot. That’s how they critique movies—solely on the plot! From the stunning opening of this movie, it’s clear you’re not interested in exposition. This is cinema, that’s it. We’re dealing with emotions, images, and sound. I wish more people appreciated that. I think maybe they do, subconsciously.
Maybe they do, you know? It depends on what people want out of a film. At different times you want different things. A lot of people—and I’m this audience sometimes—want escapism. Look at the way people use score. Score, even more than expositional dialogue, is the way to telegraph a pass, like in basketball. You never telegraph a pass—you never want the defense to know where you’re looking, because they’ll know where you’re going to throw the ball and then they’ll steal it. You can telegraph so much by having two characters speak, and then you put this music underneath it. Everybody knows they’re supposed to be scared, or they’re supposed to be happy, or they’re supposed to be sad. When you remove score, which I mostly did in Shotgun Stories, it’s very offputting to people. All of a sudden, they’re having to judge a scene on its own merits, not on this feeling that you’re giving them. They actually have to start listening. That’s just an example of my broader approach: If you remove certain things, people have to listen.

Some people don’t want that experience when they go to the theater, and that’s okay. I’ll catch you the next time, or maybe I’ll catch you on a Sunday night, when you’ve got a little more free time. It’s my job, though, to try and understand the nature of how people receive stories. It’s natural to search for plot. That’s how our brains work. I don’t hold it against anybody, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to challenge them through a new type of organization of information. Because that’s all it is—you’re just organizing information in a certain way so that it lands at certain times. My movies have plot. I just don’t think it’s the going concern. I think writers are so concerned sometimes with just making things clear.

I know that studios are. They test these things to make sure that no stone is unturned and that people are getting what they want. But what people want isn’t always what they need. I’m fascinated by story dynamics. I’m fascinated by what works for an audience and what doesn’t, what keeps them engaged and what doesn’t. If you’re not working on the edge of all that, you’re never going to have a situation where someone says, “My nails were dug into the edge of my chair,” and one person writes, “This movie is boring as hell.” I have to be okay with both of those responses. I don’t think I could get either if I was just trying to walk down the middle of the road.

About the opening, again, which I love so much…
I think it’s the best opening I’ll ever do.

Some people might consider it disorienting, but I think, for this story, you get exactly the amount of information you need.
What’s funny for me is, I think it’s so obvious. I’m wondering, like, will people just know that, once he picks the boy up into his arms in the hotel room, that obviously he’s not a kidnapper? Yes, they do, but since it hasn’t been so specifically told to them, they feel it, but they don’t know it yet. That’s a really great place to be. To me, it’s just so obvious. “That mystery’s solved.” But it’s not yet. It’s not totally solved. I have this line of Sam Shepard revealing, “The birth father, Roy Tomlin.” I wrote that scene specifically to be a surprise to the FBI, because they haven’t had the ranch under surveillance long enough to know that he was the birth father. The thing I’m wondering is, is it a surprise to the audience? That’s what I [mean] when I talk about narrative mechanics. I’m just so fascinated. When did you know? Here’s when I tell you, or here’s where I specifically don’t tell you.

Obviously, Joel Edgerton’s profession in the film—that was really specific. I remember giving [the script] to this young girl who was going to be a PA on our film. I gave her the script, and maybe she wasn’t the sharpest tack in the drawer, but she read it and just so clearly was like, “You have to tell us sooner that he’s a state trooper. We need to know that because I was really turned off when he did what he did at the end of the film. If I had known that, I’d have felt a lot better about his character a lot sooner.” She was so earnest in her argument. But it’s like, don’t you understand that you having all these emotions is part of the process? It’s part of the story. It just made me smile, and she probably thought I was a dickhead.

Joel gives you so much.
He’s a great actor.

In that scene in particular, he tells you what you need to know in how he behaves.
There you go! I thought it was pretty obvious. He walks over to the fallen state trooper and speaks in a way that no normal person would speak on the police radio. I was like, well, I’m just letting people know there. That’s what his character would do. A bad version of that writing would be [for him] to go over and say, “Hey, hey, there’s a police officer shot.” That wouldn’t be honest to him either. He wants that guy to get help. That’s why he goes and does it. He did not want to go shoot that guy. You could have Jeff Nichols the writer brain go, “If I have him speak that way, I’ll show my cards too soon.” But that’s as dishonest as having him explain that he’s a state trooper. Both of those things are dishonest. My fear for this movie…any shortcoming is when I might have been to purposefully ambiguous in a scene. I’ve read that critique, and I’ve gone back in and I’ve looked at it, and I don’t know. I’ve been able to reason out why they would behave that way. Point being, character behavior trumps all narrative desire.

I paint myself into corners all the time. It’s like, okay, I have this very strict rule about character behavior and dialogue, but I need this piece of information in the movie. It’s my job to craft a scene that allows that piece of information to come through, or we don’t get it. Then I deal with that consequence. It’s like an austerity to the writing you have to apply. You really have to stick to it. You really do.

Kirsten Dunst’s character is one of my favorite motherly characters in a while. You don’t see this stuff often. Without spoiling anything, the things she does, the way she reacts to things—it feels authentic, it feels real.
I think she’s the strongest character in the film. I think she’s able to do something the male characters can’t, specifically Michael Shannon’s. I’m not just saying this to gain the pro-women’s lib lobby. Watching my son be born and what my wife did and then what she did the year that followed…there’s no doubt in my mind that women are the stronger sex in terms of fortitude and emotions. I was very struck in high school when I read A Doll’s House by Ibsen. It’s about a mother that leaves her children. I came from a home where that would not be possible. But it is possible. That’s why the mother in Shotgun Stories hates her children. She blames them for her place in life. Their existence lowered her, in her mind. I was fascinated by the idea that there could be a mother character that would come to the conclusion first of what the inevitability of parenthood is. It made sense to me that a mother would be the one to understand the cycle of parenthood before the father, who has undeniably committed his entire life to the safety of his boy. It takes the mother to realize the cycle that they’re a part of.

I don’t think Michael’s character understands it fully or is willing to accept it fully until the boy gets out of the car. I think it’s important, but it’s also a big narrative risk. You’ve built this father-son story, the mother doesn’t come in for the first thirty minutes, and she’s tangential. Then you do this physical handoff where she’s the one who physically represents their position to their child at the end of the film. I had no idea if it would work, and for some people, I’m sure it doesn’t. I reason out, character-wise, why it would work out that way. Like I said, she’s the stronger of the two. I’m glad to hear you say you like her…because I like her.

That moment you mention where the boy gets out of the car broke my heart.
Good! That’s the one. David Fincher talks about how every movie should have an emotional punch in the gut. That was mine. I have one in each of my films. I’m glad you liked it.

Sevier (Adam Driver) is great, too.
Adam Driver is, in my opinion, going to be one of the most important actors of our generation, irrelevant of Star Wars. I think he’s that good. He’s that interesting. I want to make a detective movie with him really badly.

Why a detective movie?
Because I want to make a detective movie.

[laughs]
Because I’m a huge fan of Fletch. I just want to make a private eye movie.

With Everybody Wants Some!!, Richard Linklater returns to the youthful hangout vibe of Dazed and Confused, this time focusing on a college baseball team in the ’80s as they party around town on the weekend before school starts. The cast, made up of relative unknowns, has an easy chemistry and flowing dynamic, something Linklater has learned to orchestrate masterfully over his thirty-year career.

The story is inspired by Linklater’s experience as a college athlete in the ’80s when he met teammates who would become lifelong friends. As always, he captures the everyday idiosyncrasies of his characters’ personalities in subtle ways we probably don’t notice, consciously. What is noticeable, though, is how entertaining and surprisingly profound it is to spend time with these brutish baseball-heads as they run wild, unsupervised, in a land where they’re kings, as long as they can keep their eye on the ball.

In a roundtable interview, we spoke to Linklater about Everybody Wants Some!!, which opens this Friday, April 1st.

Did Boyhood‘s success help this movie get made?
This [movie] has an interesting relation to Boyhood on a lot of levels. I conceived them at the same time. I started shooting Boyhood when I started writing and thinking about Everybody Wants Some!!. I started writing notes and I thought, I have this film about growing up, but I also have this college movie. Somewhere in ’05, ’06, I actually wrote the script and tried to get it made. I was having trouble getting it off the ground. Filming the very last scene of Boyhood, I was telling the actors, “I have a college movie…” and it hit me that that movie starts right where this movie is ending. I hadn’t really planned it that way but I thought, that’s perfect. There would be this continuation with a very different character. The success of Boyhood helped me get it made. It did help.

When I was in college, I was a nerd, but all of my friends were like the guys in the movie. So, watching this movie was kind of special for me because it was like hanging out with those guys again. A lot of my other friends never wanted to hang around those guys because they viewed them as stereotypical jocks. I like how your movie captures what’s special about their little sports bubble they live in.
The funniest guys I was ever around were these teammates and roommates in college. Just hilarious. None of them had any comedic aspirations. “I’m going to be a comedian! I’m going to be a writer!” It never crossed any of their minds in that regard—they were just making the best of their situation. I think it’s baseball, too. Football, basketball—they’re really different sports, you know? Baseball has a lot of time around it. You have to be relaxed. In football, there’s no room for humor—you could get killed! You’re just dialed in. It’s like going off to war. If you fuck up, you’re dead. In baseball, you’re relaxed and focused, which is kind of a hard thing to balance. But baseball requires it and the arts require it, and you do better. So if you can be kind of funny on the bench, it’s good for the team. A [baseball] coach will keep a light attitude while a football coach isn’t farting around. Baseball is just different. It’s a different mentality.

There are some parallels you can spot between this movie and Dazed and Confused. The hazing scenes, the character arc of someone entering a new phase of their school life, being dismissed and guided by their more seasoned peers. Did you make any conscious efforts to echo back to Dazed and Confused?
I didn’t have to. I was always very upfront that this was sort of a sequel. If you imagine Mitch’s character, played by Wiley Wiggins, playing better and getting a scholarship, this would be where he’d show up at college. It’s a different guy because I waited so long—Wiley’s, like, 38 years old now. I think I was always upfront about it being, that was my high school, this is my college. It’s a similar kind of ensemble vibe, so that’s as far as that goes. I think the humor, the initiation you mentioned—I think it’s more sophisticated, more psychological. You can’t get any worse than paddling and treating girls like hot dogs. That’s really low. This movie is more subtle. I thought [the connection between the films] would be more subtle and for people who knew the films. But I think they found out that, with a cast of relative unknowns, that that was an appealing aspect. So many people have seen Dazed that it would become a marketing element, which is okay with me because it just so happens to be true. [laughs]

The chemistry between the cast members is great. I’m wondering if you had any bonding sessions with them.
Oh yeah. It was, like, enforced. I have some land outside of Austin. I built a farm and I have a bunkhouse. They lived there. I was like, “Hey! This is your home for the next three weeks.” They all moved in and it was just the most fun work-play environment. They just jumped in, man. Full-force. We’d rehearse scenes and the guys who weren’t in it could go swim or play ball or just have fun. It was work, play. Work, play. In the evening, we’d watch a movie. Something period, something related. We never got off making the best movie we could. I think I’ve gotten better at casting over the years. I’ve learned things.

I think I’ve gotten better at casting over the years. I’ve learned things. In an ensemble environment, the wrong person, the wrong energy, will throw it off. I think, for instance, two guys—Niles and Beuter—are kind of on the outs with the team to a large degree. You could cast weirder actors who are kind of different, but that risks throwing off the vibe. I went to those two actors and went, “I want you to come in and do serious character work.” Juston Street had played some pro ball. I said to him, “What about Niles?” and he said, “I know that guy! Every team has one guy like that.” I said, “Why don’t you play that guy?” He said, “Yeah…I get it.” We had fun. We just went way out there with that guy. Will Brittain, who plays Beuter, he’s a serious, good actor. I think it’s the way the rest of the cast responds to that. They see them come in and do serious character work for technically less likable characters, and it ups their game. It sets a good example. There’s a pecking order to the cast. There are four or five parts that are smaller, four or five lines in the script. It’s about getting those to be additive, to make those real people who wouldn’t be forgotten and round out the ensemble. There’s a pecking order to the cast. There are four or five parts that are smaller, four or five lines in the script. It’s about getting those to be additive, to make those real people who wouldn’t be forgotten and round out the ensemble. The guys with the bigger parts were very generous.

Did the script change at all during those three weeks you were in the bunkhouse?
Yeah. It’s really about me adapting the script to this new cast I have. To me, that’s the crucial creative moment. The chemical magic happens there. That’s where the text, these preconceived ideas, meet real people you’re entrusting to carry the spirit of the movie. It’s important in every film, but with an ensemble, you’re collaging. “I don’t think you would say that. But you would.” I just took his line and gave it to someone else. It helps me as a writer in kind of the way you workshop theater. You have weeks of hearing it and you’re like, “Hmm…” Things I thought would be a running gag in the movie many years ago I just see not achieving liftoff. It’s kind of funny, but not that funny. I notice it’s not becoming what I thought it might, so it just kind of goes away.

It’s a fun process. You’ve got to get it right in the rehearsal. By the time you’re shooting, it’s just kind of an extension. On the day, we’re not filming and letting them do stuff. There’s just no time for that. I feel less secure with that. I don’t understand the idea of improv on camera. Any improv or new ideas, I just call that workshopping. That happens in the rehearsal. People always accuse me: “The whole film’s improvised!” Name one film that that could possibly work. I don’t understand it.

The last time I talked to you, it was with Julie [Delpy] for Before Midnight. You both said one of your favorite things about making that movie was the food.
We were in Greece! [laughs]

What was one of your favorite things about this production?
That’s so funny. Food is like a lot of things—you don’t even remember. Being an American, you don’t remember those things. But in Greece, you remember the food. [My favorite thing for this movie] was the cast. Their energy, their spirit. It was just fun. I’ll always have that. There’s something rewarding about working with young talent. They’re not jaded yet. More veteran actors have been burned in movies where they did what the director said and they don’t like it. “Maybe I shouldn’t listen. How vulnerable should I allow myself to be? Should I protect myself? Keep myself in my range of what I know will work even if it will embarrass me? Even if the film sucks, I’ll be okay. Or should I push myself out there for the movie?” Some actors quit doing that. Some of the best actors in film history quit doing that. I could list a lot of names. There’s something great about young actors who are giving everything of themselves and are there for each other.

[I was also] seeing if I could do it. It’s been a long time [since I’ve done one of these] big, youthful, ensemble things. My daughter just graduated from college, so instead of being the cooler older brother or uncle I was in earlier parts of my career, I’m technically old enough to be their dad! I met their parents the other night and it was like, “Oh! We’re the same age.” I thought I was, like, a little older than the cast. But I’m much older. When I was in college, none of them were near being born at the time. The gap’s getting bigger, but it was fun. I can’t help but think I’m a better director. I’m more confident, I know what I’ve done. It’s experience. You subtly see what goes wrong on other movies. They’re not glaring errors, but they’re things you can improve. You do that on every movie, and you carry that forward to your next opportunity to get it right.

The college atmosphere is so amazing in this film. You have all these little details. You have on character framed so that the graffiti behind them says “eat shit.” Finnegan has the old man pipe he hangs out of his pocket so everyone can see how cool he is. Were those details you knew for the characters and atmosphere as you were writing it or were they being put in during production?
A director’s job is to say yes and no to about 900 things a day. If Glen Powell comes up and says, “Hey, you know…Finn needs a pipe.” It’s up to me to go, “Oh no, Finn would never have a pipe,” or go “Yeah, you know, that’s a good idea.” He’s kind of this faux sophisticated guy in his mind. You’ve got a quick decision to make. You just have to have an instinct for it. That Truffaut film, Day For Night…my favorite line is when he goes, “I get asked questions all day long. Sometimes, I even know the answers.” I’ve found, as a director, [when someone asks] “Do you want the red thing or the blue thing?” you have to go, very definitively, “That one.” Everyone feels someone knows the answers.

Criterion’s confirmed Boyhood for the Criterion Collection. A lot of people are very excited for that. When is that going to be released and what kind of special features can we expect?
I think a little later in the year. We have a ton of behind-the-scenes stuff they have to work with. It’s a uniquely documented process. Photos, video…there are cool things coming. Interviews with the cast members over the years, the kids growing up. It’s always great as a filmmaker working with them. It’s that final little resting place for your movie. With Criterion, you’re good with them forever.

Are the Before films coming this year or next year?
I’m not sure of the release date for those, but I feel good that they’re doing the trilogy and Boyhood.

And someday this one too.
I hope so. When you get into studios, sometimes it’s a deal. I think it can work out. The Before films were from three different entities, so sometimes you have to wrangle those rights and get it all worked out.

I think Temple Baker is amazing.
Three of these guys we drew from college. Temple had played some high school ball. Those smaller parts…I wanted those guys to be athletes. I didn’t want to film around them. I wanted to film around the guys with the bigger parts. I just didn’t want to have to work that hard for the smaller parts. Temple had that raspy voice. I was like, “You’re the ultimate roommate!” He’d never acted, and he’s playing the dumb, drunk guy, but he’s brilliant. He’s way high in his class, aced his LSAT. I’d reference a movie or a book and the rest of the cast [wouldn’t know it,] and I’d be like, “I’m old. Different generation.” But he’d seen every movie, read every book. He sneaks up on you. I could tell similar stories about every guy.

With a rumbly belly and a slight twitch above my right eyebrow (which I assume was related to an acute nutritional deficiency stemming from my decision that morning to sleep in rather than eat breakfast before rushing out the door), I stare and drool like a famished dog at the assortment of hot, meaty, aromatic tacos laid out before me in the bright, virtually empty dining room of San Francisco’s back-alley taco spot, Cala.

Beef tongue. Pork. Mushroom and kale. Soft-boiled egg. Chile verde. The smells are intense, deep, and fresh, seducing me as they waft up and tickle my nose. It’s too much to take. I’m itching to wrap my fingers around those steamy tortillas and stuff slow-brasied goodness into my goddamn face. But I don’t dare lift a finger.

In just a few minutes, Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold will be huddling up with me (and two food writers) around the Mexico City-inspired dishes to eat and talk about City of Gold, Laura Gabbert’s documentary about Gold’s career, philosophy, and the city he loves, Los Angeles. After a short wait (that, due to my rabid hunger, feels agonizingly long), the mustachioed man of the hour walks in, we shake hands, and we eat. It’s gloriously tasty. Slowly but surely, in between bites, our conversation gets underway.

The film, shot over several years in and around the myriad neighborhoods of L.A., is equally touristic and philosophical, celebrating the unexplored corners and food stops of the city through the lens of Gold’s approach to culinary discovery. It premiered at Sundance last year, just weeks after Gold dropped the food critic anonymity game and began showing his face openly, to both readers and restauranteurs alike, citing the ubiquity of social media as the main factor in the decision. The film marks the first deep public look into Gold’s life and passion and is an inspiring, engaging piece of food-world filmmaking.

City of Gold is playing in select cities now.

Did Laura have complete creative control over the film?
I was allowed to tell her if something was unusually stupid, but that actually didn’t really happen. It’s not like I had final cut.

Were you in the editing room?
I didn’t go into the editing room. I didn’t really see anything until there was, like, a rough cut about two weeks before Sundance.

I imagine people would think something was up when you were being followed around by cameras during filming.
Yes and no. They were all restaurants I’d been to a million times. The ground rule was that [Laura] wasn’t allowed to film me reviewing anything. For most of the places we’d film in, a bunch of white people with film cameras wasn’t that much weirder than a bunch of white people without film cameras. My approach is sort of the opposite of what I call the “chamber of commerce” approach, where you go in, have a hearty handshake with the owner and he or she explains what the cuisine is about and what marvels your tongue is supposed to experience. Or the ones that are super food porn-y and they’re in the kitchen and it’s like, bang bang bang fireball, then perfectly plated thing. Then you have them do the, “Mmmm…” There’s none of that in this [movie]. It’s as far from the Food Network aesthetic as you could possibly get, probably.

It captures Los Angeles really well.
Thank you. That was the main thing we were trying to do, look at the city the same way I do. I’ve [seen] Laura’s first movie, Sunset Stories,  which is about this odd, beautiful friendship between two 90-year-old women in an old age home in Hollywood. You just can’t watch that movie without getting a little verklempt. She’s good at the verklempt. I was fearing that [City of Gold] would be too sentimental, but I was happy, because it didn’t seem to be that sentimental at all. There were a couple things, especially when they talk to the restaurant owners…which I have to say, I had nothing to do with. It happened almost by accident. They were going into the restaurants with me, we were shooting the food, then they’d go back the next day to shoot b-roll in the kitchen. They did that documentary thing, where you talk to the cooks and the people who run the restaurant on camera. It turned out to be some of the most interesting stuff.

I’ve always sort of ranted about how so many people define Los Angeles by flying into town, being put up in the Beverly Wilshire hotel and writing about what they can get to in ten minutes in their rental car. That’s fine, in a way, but there’s so much more.

Your work’s had a tremendous impact on so many people in that city. You’ve been writing about food now for thirty years. I’m sure you’ve seen a shift over the years in how people search for food, young people finding the kinds of places you like on their own. Is that heartening to see?
Yeah, it’s good. Food has become almost tribal, in a way that wouldn’t be thinkable ten years ago. People are on Team Vegan, or Team Omnivore, or Team Nose-To-Tail, or they refuse to eat any Mexican food that isn’t in some really inconvenient suburb. Or they’re localvores and everything needs to come from within a fifty-mile radius. Sometimes they coincide. I think it’s funny that the nose-to-tail people and the vegans have so much in common. They both have as their goal eating as few animals as possible. You go to people in bars and they’ll talk to you about homemade dinners until you just want to melt into a puddle and float down the drain. You have people who raise chickens in their backyard and they compete to see who has the yellowest eggs. It’s cool. It’s creative.

What’s the biggest misconception about your career?
Maybe that I spend my entire life talking about taco stands. I do, but I’m the critic for the L.A. Times. I’ve got a lot of turf to cover. I write about more of that than anybody else in my position, but it’s not the only thing I do. When somebody doesn’t like the review I’ve given their restaurant, they’ll always snipe about the taco thing. Then again, there are twelve million people of Mexican origin in the L.A. metro area—that’s a lot of freaking people! That’s bigger than any city in Mexico except for Mexico City. It’s bigger than Guadalajara. If you’re not taking the Mexican community seriously, then what are you taking seriously? What is more important than that?

You and Laura started this project years ago. I imagine it took some time to build trust between you two before the project could really get going.
We sort of met a weird way. A friend asked me to donate a “dinner with a critic” to her kid’s school’s silent auction. Laura bid on it and we went to dinner. She brought up the idea and I said no. She’d keep bringing it up, and the next year my kid ended up going to school with her kid, so I ended up being in the same drop-off line. It’s much harder to say no to somebody you see every day. And, obviously, the anonymity thing was more for the readers’ sake than for what was actually going on inside the restaurants.

It’s like, you go in [the restaurant] and it’s less being anonymous than that you’re not noticing them noticing you pretending not to notice them…It got to be a distraction. There’s a point at which, if there were people who don’t recognize a critic and if the chef can make a difference—which I will say he cannot—then it’s giving the advantage to people who have superior warning systems. All I can do is reserve under weird names and show up late so I don’t get jumped ahead in the line. Service doesn’t really get better, it just gets more nervous. They ask you how you’re doing every 45 seconds instead of every five minutes, which is not really an improvement.

It’s been some time since Michael Showalter‘s Hello, My Name Is Doris premiered at SXSW 2015, where the film’s seasoned star, Sally Field, made waves with an outstanding performance as the titular, socially invisible cat-lady, who we follow as she lusts after her significantly younger co-worker (Max Greenfield). As would be expected considering Showalter’s resume (he co-wrote the great Wet Hot American Summer), the film is exceptionally funny; watching awkward Doris stalk her prey is adorable and awkward and hilarious. But what’s special about the movie is that Field not only makes us laugh, but finds incredible depth in a role that, ostensibly, is a walking cliché. One of the sad realities of the movie business is that actors of age as gifted and experienced as Field are rarely afforded meaty starring roles. But, thanks to Showalter, we’ve got this terrific little film that showcases Field and her talent full-force.

We sat down with Showalter and Field in a roundtable interview to talk about the film, which hits theaters today!

I love Doris as a character. Sally, what was your immediate reaction to her?
Sally: When I read the screenplay, I loved it. I said to my agents, “I want to do this.” They said, “You should meet Michael. What if you don’t like him?” We met, and immediately he said…

Michael: It was about the comedy.

Sally: We were addressing how you can blend both of those arenas.

Michael: The big question for her was, how are you going to do all this slapstick, screwball comedy stuff—the ball pumping scene, the dancing—with this really intense, sad stuff? I don’t want to water either one down to make it a fine line. I want the comedy to go all the way. We want to play every level as loud or as soft as we want. She did ultimately map out a way. She’s crying her eyes out in the scene where she gets drunk, but it’s this sort of dramatic, feeling sorry for herself kind of crying. In the scene where the brother-in-law comes to the house, that’s a different kind of crying. That’s all the way deep down in her. It was about figuring out all these different shades of this character and how to piece it all together so we weren’t repeating ourselves.

The film feels like a perfect antidote to the kind of issue that was addressed in the Inside Amy Schumer sketch that gave that shout-out to you and your career arc. I was wondering if that was a part of the appeal of this character. Here’s a character who’s not defined as a wife, as a mother. She’s discovering her vitality, really.
Sally: The appeal of the screenplay and the character wasn’t in that it’s a “not.” It was such a unique person. A three-dimensional character that really talked about how there are all these stages in life. People always think, “Well, there’s the childhood stage—we know what kind of development goes on there. You don’t know where to put your feet down because you’re a child. Then, there’s adolescence…everyone knows what a tough stage that is. Then, there’s young adulthood—you’ve got relationships and children and a career.” The thing is, those stages go on into your 30s, your 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s. Every one of them is this new place that you arrive. When you’re older, society doesn’t let you feel, “I don’t know what I’m doing! I don’t know where to put my feet! I’m brand new and I’m too old to be this new!” That is, in a lot of ways, what this film is.

That is, in a lot of ways, what this film is. She has arrested development, yes. And she’s in her sixties, having a kind of adolescence, a birth of her own voice, her own vision of who she is, what she wants. It has to do with her mother passing away, so her life is just changing whether she wants it to or not. That is something that I really responded to, as well as the fact that age is such a weird thing. Inside, whether you’re 20, 30, 40, 50, 60…you’re still who you are. Who you are is lodged there. Human beings need to make contact with other human beings, so sometimes they don’t match, chronologically. If [Doris had] been the man and he’d been female…

Michael: It’d be Bad Grandpa.

Sally: [laughs] It’d be an Audrey Hepburn movie.

Michael: There’s a line from the movie Grey Gardens where the mother is in bed and Edie’s doing something and the mother says something to the effect of, “I lived my life.” The implication was, I may be crazy and living alone in this crazy house with a million cats, but she’s even worse because I actually had a life! I didn’t start living this way until I got way older. But Edie never even had a life! I did stuff, so I have an excuse to be this way. It’s so sad for Edie. It’s such a dig at her. That line resonated for me, and a lot of that is in this story. What Doris sacrificed for her mother was her whole life! It wasn’t just that—I think you learn in the brother scene that there were gender politics, but these were not areas the movie was going to delve into. But it was very real.

Sally: I always thought Doris was predisposed to be a hider anyway. I always saw her mother as being a big personality who took all the air out of a room. So Doris got smaller and smaller. Her mother was much more of a hoarder, so she’d bring home this stuff to please her mother. There was an injured part of Doris that preferred to hide. I recognized that, and sometimes it takes change to force you out of your own comfort zone. I don’t think she’s, like, a victim within it because I think in a lot of ways she was predisposed to be this way, and they were her choices. She could have walked away. She could have said, “You know what, Mom? Let’s see if I can earn enough money and get someone to look in on you. I’ve got some dating to do.” But she chose not to for a reason. Part of her couldn’t heal.

I think, right now, mean-spirited comedies are sort of fashionable. The humor in your movie is more classic, screwball stuff. We laugh at Doris, but it’s out of recognition. Like, when she’s daydreaming about her crush, we laugh because we’ve all been there. We’ve all liked someone like that. It’s good-natured.
Michael: The comedies I loved were not mean-spirited. I grew up on the comedies of the 70s and early 80s, which were silly—Steve Martin movies, Python, Woody Allen, Airplane! My comedic sensibility is really just silly and light and broad. Physical comedy. I love slipping on a banana peel and stuff like that. That’s always been my sensibility. I just really like silliness. It’s just my own aesthetic.

We mentioned the Amy Schumer sketch earlier in which she used your career to comment on how a female actor of age’s value is unjustifiably tied to her age. Do you find that perception to be accurate?
Sally: Of course. I feel like that’s accurate in show business and accurate in most of society. In this country, ageism for women, not necessarily for men, is a deterrent. You’re talking about show business, but it’s hard for women in every arena. It’s not getting any better. If you add any other ingredient on top of being female, like being of color, and then you add age…The statistics on all of that, of those who participate and whether they be in front of the camera or behind the camera, are pretty horrifying. They do not reflect where we are in society. I think the world has something to work on when it comes to empowering and bringing women to the table. Unless we can do that, the whole world will not heal. We’re out of balance.

In Cemetery of Splendour, Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas Widner) volunteers at a hospital in Khon Kaen to take care of soldiers suffering from a strange sleeping sickness. She takes care of Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), and she soon befriends him, along with a psychic (Jarinpattra Rueangram) who communicates with the sleeping soldiers. During her volunteering, Jen learns through a surreal encounter that the hospital’s location used to be a cemetery for kings in ancient times, and the spirits of these kings have recruited the soldiers to fight their battles in their dreams. As time goes on, and Jenjira’s bond with Itt grows, she begins questioning her own interpretation of what’s real and imagined.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest film, his first feature-length effort since he won the Palme d’Or in 2010 with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, is another sublime effort from one of the best filmmakers working today. Creating a space where dreams, reality, fantasy, politics, fiction, non-fiction and other seemingly disparate concepts intermingle with one another, the film is a serene, meditative experience where anything feels possible.

We spoke to Apichatpong Weerasethakul at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival about Cemetery of Splendour. Read the full interview below, and be sure to catch Cemetery of Splendour in theatres during its limited run.

Cemetery of Splendour is now playing in limited release in the US, and will open Friday, March 11th, in Toronto, Ontario.

This is your first feature-length film in five years. Talk about the evolution of this film after Uncle Boonmee.

I think I am pretty interested in the idea of dreams and sleeping, so [after Boonmee] I made installations and other work related to dreams as a way to escape reality, and they influenced this film. But [the film] developed pretty organically with my relationship with Jen. Also, the political situation in Thailand is getting worse and worse. I think the movie reflects that kind of confusion and sadness at the same time.

You went back to your hometown to make this film, and you’ve spoken about engaging with your memories. I’m curious as to how important memory is to you, and if you feel it’s necessary to dive back into them.

I question my memory because it’s very short term in contrast to Jen, who remembers everything, so we make a good combination. I think memory is pretty malleable, and for our generation memory is shaped a lot by cinema. So for me, it’s very interesting to try and mimic this in the movie, to ask questions about reality and if it really exists in our everyday life, because we look at things differently according to our experience. The movie is like that, along with how to give the audience a lot of space for interpretation and imagination to suggest and build their own images.

You’re pulling from very personal and subjective experiences to make this film. What is your process like when it comes to translating these experiences into something for audiences to watch?

I don’t know. Since the beginning, I’ve just made movies for myself and, hopefully, the audience could somehow relate to the rhythm of the narrative over the years. It kind of makes sense that people get used to certain logical or illogical things in my films because it’s like a friendship. You start to learn, so it’s a span of time and not only about a single movie.

Did the film change from how you originally developed it once you worked on set and in post-production?

It’s always changing, but the core is there. It’s pretty straightforward, especially for this film. We don’t have much improvisation. We did [improvise] in the pre-production rehearsal, it changed quite a bit for dialogue and movement, but overall it’s pretty clear from the beginning. And we shuffled quite a bit in the editing room, but I have to say that it is more than I expected. When I watched the finished film, I cried. I didn’t expect that to happen. I didn’t expect it to have such an emotional link to myself.

What brought that reaction out of you?

I think it was the feeling of powerlessness. When I watched the film through the eyes of Jenjira, her desire and her inability to grasp the difference between reality and fantasy.

Do you feel there are many people like Jenjira who find themselves lost between reality and fantasy?

I’m sure for us, Thai people at this time, we would feel there’s kind of an unstable future. I hope it can translate to any audience.

Your film is very political, but audiences outside of Thailand might not pick up on that aspect if they’re unaware of the situation in your country.  

I’m making the film I want to make that I feel comfortable looking at. It doesn’t feel like an overload of information like you’re reading a report or something, but as long as the audience can connect to it spiritually it can lead to curiosity and, I don’t know, googling [Laughs]. I think my job is only the beginning part.

A lot of things are converging in your film at the school: military, education, health, and even technology with the construction going on. What draws you to merging all these things together into one place?

It may be about how our brain works, all these spaces collapsing to form a new experience. I am just trying to make sense of my memory and the sadness of leaving Khon Kaen as well.

Do you feel sad when you go back to your hometown?

Of course.

Is it nostalgia? Do you wish your town was back to the way it was when you were younger?

No, but I’m a very nostalgic person. I look at everything from the perspective of my past experiences. I always ask or always see what has changed or what is left. It’s especially obvious in my hometown because it’s been changing very quickly.

You’ve been working with Jenjira for a while, and you’ve worked with Banlop before as well. Are you naturally inclined to want to work with Jen and other actors from your previous films whenever you start a new project?

Yes, it’s automatic. I like to [be updated] and continue following their trajectory in life. Now Jen got married to an American, and she got her leg operated on.

How is she now after the surgery to stretch her leg?

It’s strange because the process was that you have to stretch the leg with this huge weight until it’s the same length as the other leg, and then you operate to make it stable. She passed the stretch process and got operated on, but after the operation it moved back. It’s still better than before, but her leg is about four centimeters shorter now instead of ten.

How do you feel about the future of Thailand?

It surprised me that Thailand lasted this long, but I don’t see the future actually. I just feel that this military is raping the country in the name of national security that I think it’s kind of sad to everyone. But at the same we are just part of the world and the borders are disappearing. It’s a conflicted feeling. I feel hope for cinema, but at the same time, I feel hopeless for the country.

You’ve said you’re interested in working in South America next. Do you feel like you’re finished with making films in Thailand?

I feel that in Thailand it’s finished for feature films. I set a rule that I’d like to make a short film in Thailand once a month in exchange for being able to go out and make a feature. It’s a different contract with myself.

A tale of love and nightmares, They Look Like People is a haunting, fun, emotionally rich genre piece that gives you plenty to ponder after the closing credits. Filmmaker Perry Blackshear and actors Evan Dumouchel and MacLeod Andrews ran a tiny, DIY production with a crew that consisted mostly of themselves, but they’d have had it no other way. Their goal was simply to make something together, bounce ideas off of each other and strengthen the bond and friendship they already had. In this regard, the project was a complete success. The fact that the movie kicks copious ass is just icing on the cake.

The movie follows Wyatt (Andrews), a disturbed man who foresees an impending war with otherworldly shape-shifters. Teetering on the edge of madness, he stays with his friend Christian (Dumouchel), who’s trying his best to understand Wyatt’s paranoia but struggles to come to terms with his bizarre visions. Confused and pushed to the breaking point, their friendship is put to the test, all leading to a heartstopping moment of truth that will change their lives forever.

I spoke with Perry, Evan and MacLeod during their visit to San Francisco this past February to talk about They Look Like People, which will be available to watch on demand in the coming months. To keep track of the movie, visit theylooklikepeople.com and like their facebook page.

I liked how the film explored mental health. I remember when I was battling depression I’d sometimes think terrible thoughts about my loved ones. It was really weird.
Perry: My friend went through a really tough time and started to think people were spying on him and also that people he loved were evil things pretending to be his loved ones. This friend is now extremely successful and married and is about to have his first kid. There isn’t anything deeply wrong with him, but I think that kind of thing can happen to anybody. It’s scary, man.

Evan: We’ve had a lot of people talking about how they can identify with what’s going on in the film. Maybe not just those kind of thoughts, but any issue you have with a friend. It resonates with people by simply asking them how they would react to a similar experience.

MacLeod: There has been a handful of people who very specifically have had similar circumstances with their friend.

Perry: We guys are really emotionally inept. [laughs] Sometimes when your friend is going through something, you’re just like, “Cool, man. Well…cool.” [laughs]

Evan: “Whoa, that sucks, bro.”

Perry: You can’t just say, “Call me if you have a problem.” There have been times when I’ve missed those kinds of signs. You have to kind of stay with someone. The movie’s about paying close attention to stuff like that.

What’s nice is that your movie is a love story between to guy friends who are very vulnerable. I feel like the media doesn’t really depict men as being vulnerable or needing help enough.
Evan: I would argue Whiplash is a love story between two men! [laughs]

You know what? I interviewed Damien Chazelle and I said that to him. I said that I felt it was a sexual movie, not in the literal sense of Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons being romantic, but in the tone of their relationship. He looked at me like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Evan: I definitely feel like it’s a love story, or at least a way that men can be men with each other that’s not about anything that’s sexually charged. There are a lot of different kinds of love. I think it’s important to explore that.

Perry: I wanted the movie to be about love between humans. People have said “bromance,” but I think it’s that these friends just happen to be guys.

MacLeod: But I think it is specifically about Christian’s experience and how he perceives masculinity; how he approaches women, how he wishes he could.

Talk about the scene where you’re doing judo with Margaret.
Evan: The take you see in the film is the first one. We didn’t know if we had the camera set up or the sound right. She had told us that she was a brown belt in judo, but that’s like someone saying they’re a concert pianist and you’ve never heard them play the piano. We were like, “Cool. She’s probably taken a few judo classes.” She proceeded to dismantle me. Everything you see, like when she asks me if I’m ready, I’m just being real to the experience prior to getting my butt kicked. [laughs] I got the wind actually knocked out of me. That’s all take one.

Perry: Right before she put the rear naked choke on him, she said, “I just did this at a wedding, and the guy passed out.”

How about tapping on her ass? Was that planned?
MacLeod: That’s just what happened. He was trying to tap out.

Evan: Mostly I was fighting for breath.

I was watching the movie in my apartment, and when she did the judo throw I was like, “OOOOHHHHH!!!” My wife asked if I was watching UFC, which I do a lot, but I told her, “No—this dude just got judo thrown on his ass on the fucking grass!”
Perry: Who’s the woman who broke, like, 100 girls’ arms?

Ronda Rousey.
Perry: Margaret used to do judo with her. But yeah, that was the first take, and we didn’t know what was going to happen, so you can actually hear in the footage all of us go, “OH MY GOD!!!”

Evan: Then we did four more takes, and we used the first one anyway. [laughs]

Just sitting with you I can tell you guys make a good team.
Perry: The whole reason I made the movie was to work with these guys. We bought the plane tickets for the movie before I wrote the script, which was a big leap of faith on their part. I told Margaret I was making a movie and it had no script, and she said yes. It was a really tiny crew and very collaborative. It was extremely hard. A lot of times the difficulty on set is navigating the different personalities and millions of logistics, but this movie felt like the four of us together, hiking up a giant mountain. There were no overlords.

MacLeod: I think we’re all sensitive to trying to take responsibility and work harder. If one of us would be tiring out, the others would be like, “I can handle this right now.” We’d kind of clap each other up.

Evan: We could all sense when we needed to be there for each other.

MacLeod: Perry’s been on tons of film sets and has seen everything that can go wrong on them. To us, an important thing was to come out of making this movie and still be friends. Perry presented to us this little constitution of ten laws that ended up being so important. One of them was to try and get eight hours of sleep a night. No drinking. If two of the three people take the other one aside and say, “You’re getting a little grumpy. You need to go have a snickers,” you have to stop and go eat something, no matter what. You start getting angry and short with people, and a lot of times it’s because you’re hungry. All three of us would do that at some point.

Evan: Another really important one was 20-minute naps after meals.

MacLeod: Snack time and nap time.

Perry: It’s basically preschool.

MacLeod: Preschool is kinda genius! It’s the basics of what people need!

That’s going to be the headline of the article, by the way: “Preschool is Kinda Genius.”
Perry: We didn’t have much money, but the equity we had was each other. It was very important to protect that and to make sure we were functioning.

MacLeod: The three of us working together was the point. The movie turned out great, but it was secondary to the process of working together. Protecting the friendship and the process was more important that manipulating each other.

Perry: I have a lot of director friends. On bigger sets, there are a lot of tough decisions to be made about relationships and success. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but our number one priority is to make sure we stick together.

Moving forward, how do you protect that bond? It’s going to get harder.
Perry: One of the biggest things I learned is that there’s more than one way to make a movie. Our way isn’t necessarily the right way, but it worked for us. The Duplass brothers make Hollywood movies, but they have a union crew. Once they set up the set, they get them out on the lawn for a day, and it’s just them and the cinematographer and the actors in a room. They protect the things that matter. We learned the things that are really important to us: the story, the characters, and the relationships. If other stuff started to infringe on those, we’d bring it back to what mattered. Hopefully, we can keep doing that even if things start getting bigger. My favorite thing about moviemaking is making them together, with your crew.

There’s a climactic moment of suspense at the end of the movie involving a paper bag. Regarding what’s underneath the bag: it could have gone one of two ways. I love the way you chose to go. I feel like most movies would go the other way. Was that always the ending, or was there a serious decision to be made about which way you went?
Perry: There was a decision to be made. The ending changed throughout writing the script a lot. Even though it’s a movie about monsters and scary stuff, it ended up being way more personal than we expected. The ending emerged from that.

Evan: I think it speaks to Perry’s use of structure and creating a truth to the answer to both questions. I’m really happy about it. The question exists in people’s minds of whether one or the other could be the case. Each could have been true for somebody, and that’s cool for me to hear.

Perry: We wanted to end in a way that gave some answers to some questions, but left others unanswered.

“What the hell am I doing here?” I thought. Standing next to me by the Oakland Technical High School football field was Hugh “Wolverine” Jackman, leather jacket and all; next to him, his Eddie The Eagle co-star Taron Egerton and the movie’s director, Dexter Fletcher. The Australian megastar’s dashing good looks had me flabbergasted enough, but nothing was more distracting than the fact that I was standing next to WOLVERINE, my childhood hero! Reading the comics rabidly back in the ’90s, I never expected Logan would be this tall in person…

Making the scene even more absurdly amazing was the action playing out on the field just yards away: Throwing passes and running drills with high-school kids were Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Johnson and recently-retired Seattle Seahawk Marshawn Lynch, who were there in support of Fam 1st Family Foundation. Again I thought, “What the hell am I doing here?”

What I was doing, actually, was talking to the three talented men in front of me about their new film, based on the story of Michael “Eddie” Edwards (Egerton), a British ski-jumper who captured hearts worldwide with his inspiring journey to and performance at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. Jackman plays his reluctant coach, a fictional character conjured to provide Eddie’s story with a bit of friction and an element of camaraderie. When asked about the creation of the character, Jackman joshed: “I did test for Eddie…” His joke was met with thunderous, perhaps slightly exaggerated laughter from me because I was starstruck and shameless and simply couldn’t resist (I’m sure my fellow journalists participating in the roundtable can sympathize). He’s a real charmer, that Wolvie.

While I still have no clue how in the world a schmuck like me ended up in the star-studded situation I did, I’m glad fortune chose to smile on my that sunny day, allowing me to bring you this interview about a movie I found to be genuinely funny and inspiring and a whole mess of fun for all ages. Sure, it was cool chatting it up with your favorite X-Man. But the truly important people that day were running up and down that football field, the kids who, hopefully, with the boost of these famous fellows’ encouragement, will fight tooth and nail to reach beyond their wildest dreams in the spirit of Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards.

You can watch Egerton and Wolv…er…Jackman in Eddie The Eagle this weekend as the movie opens nationwide.

Walk us through the decision to include Hugh Jackman’s character in the movie since he wasn’t a real character.
Dexter: [The movie’s] about Eddie and his journey but it’s also important that there’s some sort of attempt to explain who Eddie is and what he’s going through, why he’s feeling the things that he is, and also have a character that pushes back against him [so that] the audience feels they’re a part of that journey as well. Initially, that’s the heart of it. We as an audience need a character who’s going to push Eddie on why he’s doing what he does. But it develops into something more interesting than that. You’ve got to have a human relationship at the heart of a film like this because that’s what people understand. It was important that Eddie didn’t feel like this lonely character. So we created this other character and it becomes a movie about friendship. That’s really important. You create a character who’s the polar opposite of Eddie and it throws a light on both of [them] and gives [the actors] something to get their teeth into. And Hugh Jackman wanted to be in it!

Hugh: I did test for Eddie. [laughs] Just to be clear, most of this movie is based on truth. There are some deviations but the key things, the most amazing things—his jumping, the injuries, the coming back, the fact that he was sleeping in a closet—all that is true.

Dexter: There were people that did help along the way and, of course, in a film you’ve got six, seven different characters coming in and playing some part in that journey. That becomes confusing. So we reduced that into one super-character which, in fact, would be Hugh Jackman. It’s a storytelling exercise. It’s facts told in a fictional way.

Taron, what was it like playing this role that could potentially inspire children and young adults? How does that make you feel as an actor?
Taron: If that’s the case, I can’t imagine anything more rewarding for an actor. That’s truly, truly gratifying on a level more than anything. The thing I love about Eddie is that he’s someone who’s easy to make fun of, deride, mock—but actually, he’s got this incredibly unique quality so few people have. Not that he’s impermeable but he takes the negative and is able to turn it into fuel for the positive. So, when someone says something unkind to him or tells him he can’t do it, in a very quiet, dignified way, he doesn’t engage with it or retaliate—he just allows it to make him stronger and tougher. I think that’s probably one of the most valuable lessons you can learn.

One of the things that appealed to me most about the movie is that it doesn’t take itself so seriously. We can actually laugh at Eddie a little bit, in a good-natured way.
Hugh: It’s called being British! [laughs] It has got that British, Full Monty quality. If you’re too earnest and on-the-nose in England, it’s never going to work! I think Eddie enjoyed having a laugh. If anyone ever in sports has shown [they] like to have a laugh at themselves, it’s Eddie Edwards.

Taron: Eddie’s a bright chap; he’s not an idiot. He knows that what he did was funny. He had been doing it a fraction of the time his competitors had been doing it, and it was this terrifying, death-defying jump he kind of threw himself into. That’s funny, and he knows that. When he saw the movie, he was thrilled. I think it’s because he knows that we struck the balance. There was a funny side but obviously, to him, it was a very serious thing. I know Dexter was very conscious—and we were, too—of making it a balance. You have to leave the theater going, “Yes! He did it!” I hope we’ve succeeded.

Hugh: At one point, [Eddie] actually broke his jaw and tied it up with a pillow case and competed like that.

Taron: We shot that, actually, but it didn’t make it in!

Hugh: Oh, really?

Dexter: We did! But also, I don’t think we treat [the story] in a sort of sentimental, mushy way. If you’re going to get up on those ski jumps, you’ve got to have a certain amount of fortitude. He’s not like, “I hope I don’t hurt myself.” He doesn’t even think about that. Being unsentimental allows him to be strong. We know he’s a strong character with a strong story, so we can afford to laugh at him.

Hugh, when looking at your role here, Charlie Kenton in Real Steel and even Wolverine, there’s a through line of rogues with a heart of gold. What draws you to characters like this?
Hugh: It’s the opposite of me because I’m seemingly very likable and outgoing but underneath there’s just zero heart. [laughs] I’m sure sometimes these kinds of roles come to me because of Wolverine, who’s sort of the ultimate reluctant hero. I just really love this story. If there had been some other construct or character, I probably wouldn’t have been part of it. I loved working with these guys and I do love, I suppose, seeing on film that idea of redemption. [My character] is someone who lives with a lot of regret and is, therefore, kind of cynical to the world. Deep down, he realizes he stuffed up his chance for whatever reason. Lack of self-belief, obviously. I love the idea that people are redeemable, I suppose.

Dexter: I think also that you’re not afraid to play the human flaw, you know? To play someone who’s flawed is a more interesting thing altogether. He’s flawed; he’s human; he’s real. I think that needs to be something you readily tackle and relish as well.

Perhaps for the entirety of his career, Aaron Paul will be tied to the iconic role of Breaking Bad‘s burnout-turned-meth-hero Jesse Pinkman. It’s something he’s thankful for: “I’m very blessed to have played an iconic character,” he says graciously. Since that landmark TV show, Paul’s stayed away from drug-addict roles for obvious reasons. But when he was presented with the script for John Hillcoat‘s ensemble crime-thriller Triple 9, he jumped at the chance to work with the director, despite the fact that he’d once again have to pick up a pipe on-screen.

The decision paid off: Paul is an absolute standout in a movie full of Hollywood heavy-hitters including Kate Winslet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie, Gal Gadot, Norman Reedus, Clifton Collins Jr., and more. Playing a member of a gang crooked cops pulling off an elaborate, dangerous heist, the still-evolving actor makes every onscreen minute count, creating a character with dimension and depth in what’s essentially a series of quick glimpses. Looks like he’s continuing to hone the tools he sharpened opposite Bryan Cranston on that seminal show forever doomed him to be referred to as “bitch” by his adoring fans. “I gotta take it in stride, you know?”

In a roundtable interview, I spoke to Paul about Triple 9, which is out in theaters nationwide today.

You’re sort of unrecognizable in this movie. The hair, the strung-out-ness. How did you go to that place? It feels like he’s so out of his depth at this point in his life.
He’s going through a lot. It was kind of easy; it was just on the page. I think these characters were so well developed before I even attached myself. Before we even started, John gave us all a giant folder of information, a dropbox that just kept filling up every day with images that are impossible to erase from your mind. Decapitated heads…he wanted us to draw from our own knowledge.

He had me go on some ridealongs with the LAPD and I saw some pretty crazy stuff. We drove around East L.A. in a neighborhood I’ve never been to in my life. You just see how cops are viewed. We pulled over this guy whose girlfriend had just been shot. She was in the front seat, his mom was in the back seat. This was now his third strike because he had a loaded gun on him with the serial number scratched off. Things got pretty real. He was arrested went down to the station. They take off his shoes, he’s handcuffed to this bench, and they ask me if I want to go in and interview him. He has tattoos all over his face—scariest guy I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m like, “No…I don’t want to go.” There was no reason for me to go interview him but I did end up going in to talk to him. He ended up being a fan of Breaking Bad, which is pretty funny.

What was your reaction to the script and this idea of these characters pulling off a “triple 9?”
God, I loved this script. I knew with John holding the reigns it was going to be such a brutal telling of this story but in a grounded way. I didn’t know what “triple 9” meant before shooting this film but it absolutely makes sense. If someone wants to cause a distraction in the police force, that’s definitely the way to do it. I love the story.

Early in the movie, you and Norman have a pivotal scene together. I think it’s such an important scene because you have to establish a lot of the emotional stakes for what’s to come for those characters.
Norman and I have been friends for the past sixteen, seventeen years. It’s the first time we’ve worked together, and we’re playing brothers, so we already have that bond, that love there. That scene you’re talking about was an added scene we shot after we were done shooting. They wanted to do just that—raise the stakes, really let people know that these guys aren’t just friends; they’re brothers. They love each other. It was great. I love that scene.

There are similarities between this character and Jesse Pinkman. Do you feel constrained by how iconic that character is?
I definitely don’t see Jesse Pinkman leaving me anytime soon. I know for the rest of my life I’m going to be called “bitch.” I gotta take it in stride, you know? I’m very blessed to have played such an iconic character [on a] show that became a part of television history. He’s a part of pop culture. It’s all about trying to do something different from that guy. This is really the first role since that show where my character’s picking up a pipe. I get offered drug addict roles all the time, on a weekly basis. I just try to stay away from that. But this script was impossible to ignore. It was beautiful. And, of course, John Hillcoat was the first name I noticed before I started reading it. It was a great ride, but when [my character] picked up the pipe, I was like, “Aww…Does he have to do that?”

The movie felt a lot like Heat.
Yeah. Heat is one of those timeless films. I really hope Triple 9 becomes that. My father-in-law was so excited. “It was like Heat! It’s like Taxi Driver!” I agree with him. It’s one of those gritty, brutal, crazy films.

You’re an actor who acts with his whole body. I appreciate that. Is it something you think about when you’re on camera or no?
It just kind of comes with the territory for me. Every character’s a little different. The only similarity is that I tend to gravitate toward characters that are going through a lot, emotionally. I think emotions run through your entire body. You kind of put yourself in a situation and force yourself to believe in whatever’s going on and hopefully people buy it.

In Need For Speed you were at the head of the ensemble. For this movie, it’s more of an egalitarian mix. How are those experiences different?
[One’s] less work, less shooting days. But I love them both. I love the ensemble cast. There are twelve main characters in this film and everyone has such a pivotal part in the story. With Need For Speed, I was in almost every scene. It was a lot of work.

What about the next movie, Eye in the Sky? What’s it like going from playing a criminal in this movie to playing someone who’s straight-laced and in the military?
I do play the darker side of things. But I always try to bring some sort of heart to my characters. With Triple 9, he’s technically a bad guy but you feel for him. He has a line he will not cross and this is that line, so he’s desperate to stop it from happening.

He’s really the hero of the movie.
Finally, someone said it! [laughs] It’s great being the bad guy and it’s also great being the good guy.

Who’s an actor that would be a dream for you to work with?
Oh man, there’s so many. I think probably Daniel Day-Lewis. He’s my favorite actor, for sure.

How about actors who aren’t alive?
You’re really changing things up on me, man! I would love to work with Marilyn Monroe. She’s such an idol, such a legend. I’d just love to kind of hang out with her in between takes and see what she’s all about.

A genre adventurer of sorts, filmmaker John Hillcoat has made a western (The Proposition), a post-apocalyptic drama (The Road) and a period gangster movie (Lawless) in his career thus far. Now, with Triple 9, he tackles the crime thriller genre, assembling an A-list cast (including the likes of Kate Winslet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Clifton Collins Jr., Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Norman Reedus, Aaron Paul, Anthony Mackie and more) to tell a gritty, urban tale of crooked cops, bank heists, double-turns and gang violence. Set in Atlanta, the film holds authenticity as its highest priority as the dozen-or-so protagonists maneuver, duck and dodge around each other until the bloody, bitter end.

In a roundtable interview, I spoke with Hillcoat about the film, which opens tomorrow nationwide.

You’ve expressed your desire to elevate genre movies. How did you elevate the crime thriller with Triple 9?
I feel like this genre, in recent years, has become very unrealistic. Initially, there were the golden years when film noir was created and all these fantastic, murky shades of grey were created. In the ’70s, they took all of these great genres and shook them up and gave them this kind of gritty realism. That’s what I miss in contemporary crime thrillers. The characters always seem to be chasing the plot. I wanted to find something where you didn’t know what was coming. In a lot of this genre, I feel like I already know what’s going to happen before it happens. [I also wanted to show] shades of grey instead of black and white. Again, in this genre, it’s become, “there’s the good guy, there’s the bad guy.” With all of that, I also wanted to bring it into a contemporary landscape. The world of crime out there in urban cities has completely changed.

When this script crossed your desk, was it something where you were looking to do something in this vein? What got your neurons firing?
I’d been looking for a contemporary crime thriller to do for well over a decade. My problem was, every time I’d read something, I felt like I could predict what was coming around the corner. My manager and producer brought a first-time writer and showed me this script because they knew I wanted a crime thriller that was a bit more unpredictable and grounded in reality.

There’s a lot to keep track of in this movie. It’s a controlled chaos. As I was watching the movie I thought, the casting is so key because these characters have to make big impression in just a small amount of screen time.
That was the single biggest challenge out of anything, to assemble that cast and line it up to where they all had a window available at that one time. It was beyond any rubik’s cube out there. The intention was to create a milieu and world you’re immersed in as opposed to the classic, two-hander thing. I love a film like Nashville where you’re just with characters very briefly but you feel like you could disappear into their lives. Life is like that too in a crowded urban environment. I wanted to get that sea of humanity. That’s what was great about this cast—they’re all so different and bring such idiosyncratic detail. We were conscious of that going in. They had to make interesting choices and create layers because of exactly that: screen time.

I was impressed by the action mostly because the things that are happening onscreen are unpredictable and chaotic and unexpectedly change location frequently. But I never felt lost, geographically. That must be incredibly difficult to pull off.
It took immense planning. We had whole maps of neighborhoods, we had meetings with different departments, we had models made. We had different visual references made for different departments saying, “Look, here’s an accident. We want it to look like that.” There was a lot of research as well. I was working with a very gifted second-unit action guy who did the Bourne Identity films and has an immense knowledge of that. We love realism and accidents, so we’re always on the lookout for how we find those and reference those in each situation and make it work cinematically.

I think you’ll know what I mean when I say this—I feel like you as a filmmaker respect the act of violence.
I take violence very seriously. I feel like there are no real victors. There’s always an element of chaos and, psychologically, no one comes out unscathed. I think that’s the key, for the actors to feel very much like it’s their choice or whatever they do that creates the situation, the build-up to it. Then, it’s how they process it afterward. When I’m working with an actor on these sort of things, I’m looking more at the before and after than the actual incident. We are human, and that’s the thing I try to do, get that human experience instead of just seeing bodies flying apart. That doesn’t mean anything. And you’ve just reminded me, that’s something we were very conscious of: We wanted to make every single death that happens matter. It’s a significant event every time. In crime thrillers, that’s really not considered. The body count is just, like, very gratuitous.

I thought there was strategic value to the decision of killing off a particular actor early on in the movie. Audiences are very familiar with this person. It was kind of like a Janet Leigh in Psycho thing.
That was very intentional. We wanted to create a situation where even the characters would suddenly take this situation very seriously. It’s that feeling of not knowing who’s next. And yet, we all know—and they know as characters—that they’ve chosen this life and nothing’s going to change that. They kind of know that, eventually, they won’t be retired on a tropical island. That’s not really what comes of this. And they never know when that moment is going to happen.

You’ve said before that you’ve witnessed violence growing up and have been a victim of violence. Do you think, as a filmmaker, that you have to have had that hands-on experience to portray violence onscreen authentically?
I think it’s definitely helped and given me more respect in trying to get to the truth of the matter and take it more seriously. I’m very influenced by other movies, but I do love that kind of one foot in reality. That has, unfortunately, [happened to me]. But I would never perscribe that as a prerequisite for film students. [laughs] “Doing a crime film? Shoot yourself in the leg!” [laughs] I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone but it certainly has impacted the work I do very much.

Out in theaters today is Danish director Tobias Lindholm’s (A Hijacking) latest film, A War, a humanistic exploration of the personal and psychological struggles of soldiers. Set in Denmark and Afghanistan, the film stars Pilou Asbæk as a company commander accused of committing a war crime under duress. The consequences of his actions in the field are felt not just by him, but by his wife and kids back home. War movie sensationalism is cast aside in favor of introspective complexity in this unique, exceptional take on a Hollywood genre that’s run cold as of late. Lindholm’s use of real veterans gives his film a layer of realism that heightens the drama in a powerful, sobering way.

I spoke to Lindholm about the film and his experience making it, which is out in theaters now.

There’s a lot of moral and emotional complexity to your movie. It’s a bit challenging in that way, and it’s also about war, which makes it even trickier to market to big audiences. That being said, how does it feel to be nominated for an Oscar? That recognition will obviously garner the film a considerable amount of attention and ensure an international audience.
I mean, we are enjoying every second of it. This movie started out with me writing the first word in a blank document, then reaching out and meeting all these Danish veterans that served in Afghanistan and meeting Afghan refugees. It was never the aim to have international success and actually be nominated for an Oscar and reach this large an audience. But nevertheless, we’re here now. For me to make those phone calls to the refugees, to the veterans, telling them, “You didn’t know whether I was going to do a good film or a bad film. You had no idea. But you all were loyal and shared bravely your experiences with me. To be able to share this with them is just amazing. A lot of the soldiers who were in the film are flying out here to party with me after the Oscars. That’s basically what I’m looking forward to. [laughs]

The film will be reaching a worldwide audience now with the Oscar recognition. But as you eluded to, the most important audience, perhaps, are the veterans who were brave enough to work with you on this movie and share their stories. What was it like screening the movie for them?
Oh, that’s always the most scary part, you know? I’ve made films now for ten years and I’m kind of getting used to the fact that it’s nerve-racking to know the critics are going to watch it and that the reviews are coming out and all that. But in this case it’s even harder because the witnesses are the men and women, the soldiers. To have them view it…I can’t describe how nervous [I was]. I was walking around for two hours not knowing where to go. Luckily, in this case, everybody was very pleased. We see now that the movie also translates well to the international veterans community. In that way, we feel great that we’ve been able to be loyal to the reality we’ve portrayed.

Most of the veterans I’ve met are very humble, almost shy to share their wartime stories. For you to find this group of soldiers who were so open about their experiences is incredible.
I never asked them any questions. I sat down and listened. When I start a conversation with one of these soldiers, I’d never ask, “How was it?” and so on. It’s technical questions, like “Why do you enter a compoound like that?” To get them speaking about it from a professional point of view. It’s their pride. They know this. They’ve rehearsed it so many times. By being loyal to that and wanting to understand I guess opened them up to understand that I was not there to be a parasite. I actually wanted to understand the reality. Slowly, when everybody starts to feel comfortable, they will start to share. Then it’s my job to be the editor and find the bits and pieces I can use. But I never sit down and ask emotional questions about the war. I know that if anyone came in and asked me about the most vulnerable place in me, I would shut down and not talk about it. If that’s where the conversation ends with them, that’s okay becasue I can use the technical stuff the film. How do you handle a gun? How do you talk to the locals? Understanding that will help me portray it.

I met the first soldier at a wedding and, as we know, magical things can happen when you’re a little drunk. Not too drunk, but just a little. At this wedding I had had a couple of drinks and I ended up at the bar with another man who had been in Iraq three times and once in Afghanistan. He just started to talk about how it was to be home and wanting to raise a family. He was the first generation of being a professional soldier in Denmark ever. That opened up a conversation we continued throughout the next few years. He invited in people he served with. Him giving approval to me helped the other guys open up as well.

I have a certain reverence and respect for soldiers when I’m around them. They’ve done things I can’t imagine. There must be a great pressure to tell their stories authentically but does that impede on the artistic process in any way? You are a storyteller with a vision at the end of the day.
The reason I do these stories, is because I want to show these stories we often see in the news from a human point of view. I don’t want to be political, I don’t want to be judgmental. I just want to understand what it is to be human in that situation. The film I did before this one is called A Hijacking, about Danish sailors being captured by Somali pirates. I don’t meet these people as me being a civilian and them being soldiers. Me being a civilian and them being heroes. I always just try to meet them as human beings and try to relate to what they’re going through. This is where we’re equal. I think this is the most important thing we can do as human beings. There are a lot of points where we’re different. All of us. But where we’re the same is the most important. That’s where the audience can relate to these guys. Even though it’s not comparable, I live a life as a filmmaker where I have to leave my kids and my wife for a long time sometimes to do my films. I know the feeling of not being able to connect with them on a proper phone line. Then I can chip in, and the soldiers will be able to relate to that. It’s not a consequence of being a soldier; it’s a consequence of being away from your family. My point of view as an artist is to make a film about human beings in a conflict instead of making a film about a conflict.

What’s unique about the Danish perspective on war?
The unique thing about our perspective on the war in Iraq and, in this case, Afghanistan, is that it’s the first war we’ve fought since the second World War. In the second World War, we fought for five hours and then gave up. As you can imagine, it has defined my generation in that we’re very new to this. In many ways, we are in a post-Vietnam phase in our country right now. We are not used to being a warfaring country yet. I guess that gives us a naive perspective of what’s going on. I still feel I need to confront stuff that a lot of other nations have accepted. I think the Danish perspective is that we’re new at this. We’re still learning. Therefore, we may be asking questions other nations have started to forget to ask.

There’s a pursuit of authentic truth in your productions. I like that you wanted to reference reality in your work, not other war movies. What are the benefits of this approach to storytelling?
There’s a contradiction here. I’m an educated screenwriter. I realized quite fast that I’m not amused by my own imagination. I find it boring. If I have to sit for two hours and make stuff up, I’m like, “I can’t do this.” But if I connect with the world, that’s interesting. I love to connect with these people. One of the big benefits is to share this and try to understand the world. It helps me on a personal level to constantly confront my perspective of the world. At the same time, you can say that, by sharing, this is not my project in the world but our project, all the people who have chipped in to make this film possible. I’m a team player. I’m a soccer player from childhood. I love to be on a team. I feel the most creative and most energized when I’m surrounded by people who want the same thing as me, whatever we’re doing.

This might be a little complex, but every human being in this world is trained from the day we are born and on to understand the world around us. We all enter new rooms every day. We all always spend a second when we meet a stranger to feel if this person is sad or angry or depressed or whatever. We don’t need any time to actually relate to other people. With moviemaking, it seems we think the audience has left that ability outside the cinema. We tell them all kinds of information to make them understand who we’re dealing with. I often get frustrated with being over-informed by all kinds of details about characters in films. I just want to watch a film where I can relate to people on a human level like I relate to people on a human level on the streets or in a restaurant. I remember watching the American documentary Restrepo and suddenly relating to these guys on a human level. I especially remember the scene where one of the soldiers has an anxiety attack because one of the other soldiers is shot and killed. In the middle of the firefight, he breaks down. For me, that’s proof of human life in war. I wanted to portray that and not just make references to other films. When I’m seeing explosions in war films, they’re always way too big. When I’m watching explosion

When I’m seeing explosions in war films, they’re always way too big. When I’m watching explosions from a helmet cam, I see a lot of dirt and sand in the air. And then silence. And then the screaming starts. The timing of reality is slightly different. I found it more interesting and more beneficial to try to approach the reality of it. I think our human ear and human eye is somehow educated to understand what is real and what is not real. I want to invite people into a natural portrayal of war instead of being another fascinated film about war.

Robert Eggers‘ The Witch opens this weekend, and if you shell out your hard-earned money to watch an independent, historically authentic period piece about a 17th-century Puritan family, I’d say that’s a win for all of us who love weird, geeky productions like this one. The slow-build horror movie centers on a cast-out family of seven living on the edge of a dark and scary wood, their minds warped and ires aimed at each other by an external, possibly supernatural force. Starring Ralph Ineson as the father, Kate Dickie as the mother and Anya Taylor-Joy in a breakout performance as their eldest daughter, the film is more Satanic-family-drama than scare-factory, though its climax had me absolutely frozen in fear. Atmospheric, well-acted and directed, and full of disturbing imagery you won’t be able to shake, The Witch is one horror fans shouldn’t miss.

In a roundtable interview, I spoke to Eggers about the film, which opens wide tomorrow, February 19th.

The 17th-century Puritanical mindset is something that’s pretty integral to your story. What’s special about it to you?
The most interesting thing to me was that the real world and the fairy-tale world were the same thing for everyone except for the extreme intelligentsia. Everyday life was imbued with supernatural stuff. Witches were real; that was something everyone knew and understood, and that was the end of the story. A witch today is a plastic Halloween decoration without a lot of impact, so if I could find a way to get audiences into the mindset of a 17th century English settler, the witch could be real and scary again.

Were there any models you had in terms of trying to recreate the sort of dead vernacular in the film?
I have a background in Shakespeare so I’m sort of comfortable around this kind of language but writing in it wasn’t easy. I studied the grammar and the vocabulary—there are books that do that kind of stuff—but then it was really digging into primary source material and jotting down phrases and sentences of all different kinds of situations and categorizing them. If I needed a greeting, I would take it. In earlier versions of the script, there were disastrous, cannibalized collages of other people’s words. It took a while to turn it into me. It’s a really interesting period for the English language.

What I really liked about the movie is it puts you in this state of mind that’s almost hallucinatory. I’d swear I saw things I didn’t actually see.
I like strong imagery and there were certain things I wanted to show. But your imagination is better than what I can give you. What scares you is more personal than anything I can provide. It’s important to keep things in the shadows and keep things restrained because then they can actually be effective. Some things, if I showed them to you, would not be scary—they’d just suck. Better to keep it in your imagination.

Was there anything you read in your research process that you really liked?
I don’t know if this is my favorite but I used it a hell of a lot: Louis Bayley’s The Practice of Piety, which was, like, a prayer manual. The majority of the prayers in the film are from that book. Kate Dickie, who played Katherine…the script would sometimes say “Katherine prays.” She had a digital version of that book on her iPad and she was just walking around the corn fields reading it. It was pretty cool.

Ralph Ineson has one of my favorite voices. Was his voice one of the reasons you wanted to cast him as William?
Honestly, before I thought we could cast Ralph, his voice was the voice of William when I wrote. I was expecting we were going to have to go down the route of getting a name to do our poor little indie movie. But luckily, when we finally found investors, they trusted in my vision to cast who I wanted. I was like, “Wow. Well…let’s try Ralph out!” He’s fucking incredible and he was so committed to the role. I’m happy to see him on the screen.

Did you set the movie in the early 17th century partly because there’s something inherently scary about that historical period?
Yeah. The idea of the supernatural world being real in the past was kind of crucial for me. When we do supernatural movies that take place today I find it hard. It’s metaphysical truths that don’t work for anyone today. There are obviously successful examples that prove me wrong, for sure, but I also just like the past. I don’t want to make contemporary movies currently. I just don’t give a shit. People ask why it’s set in 1630 and not during the Salem witch trials. Aside from the fact that I could have never afforded to have something of that scope, this is much scarier. [The family’s] so much more vulnerable because they’ve just arrived at this place.

Female repression is something that exists today but in the time your movie’s set, it was much more extreme. I imagine it’s helpful to your story that women in this period kind of had this ceiling they’re never able to break through. That’s a big theme.
I tried my damnedest to do my interpretation of how a family in Puritan New England might have experienced a witching. I wanted the camerawork to be subjective but I wanted to be objective about the themes and let people come to their own conclusions. Feminism just bursts onto the screen, out of history. It just rises to the top. You cannot ignore it. It’s clear, looking back from a contemporary perspective, that the evil witch in the early modern period is men’s fears and ambivalences and desires and fantasies about women and female power. It’s also women’s own fears about themselves and their own power and fears about motherhood. The shadows of that still exist today. Sometimes they ain’t shadows.

There’s sort of a hint in the movie involving moldy corn [as to what’s going on with this family]. How important was it to give moderns an idea of what was happening?
That’s cool that you saw the ergot because most people don’t. I one billion percent do not think Salem was because of ergot of the rye. I sound like a freshmen in college, constructionist loser, but we live in a world with certain rules that are given to us by science and we say it’s the best way of understanding things. But science really isn’t objective, actually. Today, science is our god. It’s not too juvenile to say that, in one hundred years, people will look back at us and think we’re wacky. All these different pieces, from ergot to what’s in your imagination, is all tied up in interesting knots.

Costume design is something I’ve been fascinated with lately. What was your approach?
We were just trying to recreate the clothing of the time. I took a lot of work. The source material, the creation of the script, is pretty easy to access for anyone. But the stuff we had to do to make the clothing and build the farm was more obscure. I was working with historians and museums and people in the living history communities to try to create this stuff. I did so much research for years, waiting to get the money. When I brought on Craig Lathrop and Linda Muir, I gave them piles of stuff and they were pumped. We went to great lengths. All the clothes were hand-stitched and made from patterns of extant clothing. One big compromise is that they are not all hand-woven cloth. Linda ordered swatches of all this stuff, and when we could afford it we used it, but where we couldn’t, her modern equivalents were fantastic.

With the farm, I wanted to build it the way they did back then, end of story. Craig said, “That sounds like a great idea but it’s the winter and we’re never going to be able to do it when we’re up to our balls in snow.” But everything that’s onscreen is the real thing. Everything onscreen is going to be the real materials. That did mean having to use traditional techniques and tools to make the stuff. Where we could use modern tools we did, but if modern tools betrayed the authenticity to the camera, we couldn’t use them.

Since its premiere at Cannes in May 2015, Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent has been stunning audiences all over the world with its tale of Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman who helps two different explorers over two periods of time as they hunt down a rare psychedelic plant. In order to provide an accurate portrait of the Amazon location and the early 20th century time period, Guerra and his crew ventured into the Colombian Amazon to work with the native tribes and bring their vision to life. And while the film has its fair share of stunning imagery—it was shot in black and white on 35mm film—Guerra doesn’t avoid confronting the horrors of colonization going on at the time, using his narrative to explore the devastating short-term and long-term effects of the West’s destruction of Amazonian cultures.

I talked with Ciro Guerra about Embrace of the Serpent last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, and since then the film has gone on to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Read on for the full interview below, where Guerra talks about his intensive research process and what filmmaking means to him.

Embrace of the Serpent opens in New York City on February 17th before expanding to Los Angeles, Toronto and more cities on February 19th.

Tell me about your research process for this film.

It was about 3 and a half years of research during which the script was developed. The starting point was the journals of the explorers. I found them fascinating when I read them. I thought it was a great story that had not been told. I was fascinated by these men who left everything behind, who left their families and their lives to go three, four, even 17 years in the case of Schultes, to an unknown place and just tell the world about it. I first traveled to the Amazon region after reading them, and what I found was completely different. The region is completely transformed. So [the film] is part of a desire to bring back this Amazon to the way it used to be, and it was a big effort. People don’t dress like that anymore, and most of the traditions and languages are lost or in the process of disappearing.

We contacted the communities and we asked them if they want to be a part of the film. They said, “Our condition is that, in order to give you permission to shoot here, we are part of the film.” That made us very happy because we were able to collaborate. And for them, it was like bringing back the stories of their grandfathers or their ancestors they have heard from before. We wanted to bring an image of that to life because history has no image of that moment.

Were you initially nervous about approaching the communities in the Amazon?

I think the people of the Amazon are really open and friendly and enthusiastic. They are very joyous people. They can see through you, so if you’re transparent and you’re not carrying any second intentions they can see that immediately. But they ask you the really important questions, which are “What’s the real reason you want to make this film? What’s the true reason?” And for me, it meant going back and looking in the mirror and asking myself, “What is the reason I want to make this film?” When I understood that I wanted to learn and share the knowledge, I felt comfortable saying this is the reason. If the reason had been that I want to work, I want to go to a festival, win awards or make money, I should have quit at that moment.

How did you initially come upon the two journals that you based the film on?

I had a lifelong dream of making a film in the Amazon. I had come from making my first two films, which were personal and about my life, my memories, my childhood, and my culture. For this film I wanted to go the opposite way, to take a journey into the unknown. The Amazon is half of Colombia and it’s completely unknown to Colombians. It’s a place that we have very little knowledge of. I have a friend who’s an anthropologist, who was an actor in my previous film, who said if I want to go into the Amazon I should start with the journals of the explorers. I related heavily to [the journals] because, to me, making a film is like that. It’s a journey into something where you never know what’s going to happen. It’s uncharted territory every time you make a film. I related strongly to that quest and hunger for knowledge.

Your previous film Wind Journeys was shot in 80 locations, and with Embrace of the Serpent, you’re going to the Amazon to make it. You’re doing much more than other people might normally do when making a movie. Is this something you feel like you need to do in order to make a film?

I think films should be an experience, both making them and watching them. When you sit in the theatre in the dark you want to be taken somewhere. You want to be changed, you want to live an experience. For me, with the process of making a film, I like to tackle it that way. I want a film to take me somewhere, to change my point of view, to confront my ideas in life and the world. Filmmaking is a really intense experience, and I think it should be. It shouldn’t be an office job. It shouldn’t be predictable or safe. It should be risky. When there’s that excitement on your part, from the people making the film, the audience feels that.

What made you decide to shoot on 35mm?

The look of the film was inspired by the photographs that the explorers took. [They’re] almost daguerreotype kind of pictures, but they have an organic quality, and in order to have this organic quality there’s no match for film. I have no problem with high definition video. I think it’s right for urban stories, modern stories, and artificial light, but when you want to get the real texture of nature, film is the way to go. It’s not possible to think of something else. But it also gives you some limitations.

There are strengths with film. The cameras are more [like] battle cameras. Some of them were made to shoot wars, so they are good for shooting in rough terrain. They do better with humidity and external conditions while video cameras are not so tough with these environments. But there was also something else. Since we had to shoot on film, we had limited stock, so we only had two takes for each shot. With video, you can do 17 takes for one shot, but here it’s two takes, and that makes every take precious. It focuses the actors, the crew, everyone. When we used to take photographs on film, every photograph was valuable. We had to choose and take care of it. Today with the digital age, you take thousands of photographs but they have no value. You never look at them again. You don’t frame them. In film you’re making a leap of faith, and that’s fascinating.

Was it a very stressful shoot then?

I thought it was going to be. We were prepared for the worst, and it was a very demanding and tough shoot, but it wasn’t stressful. The choice that we made to be very respectful to the environment, to the communities, to make as little impact as possible, meant that we felt that the jungle was playing to our side. We felt a connection with each other and the place that we were in, so it became a very profound and spiritual experience for all of us. I feel that, when you try to bring a foreign shoot into a place like this and try to obey all the rules of the place, you can turn the place against you. But, in this case, I felt that we had the protection of the place and the spiritual support of the community, so it turned into a very happy experience for all of us.

Tell me about the way you developed Karamakate.

The interesting thing to me was not to make [something] usually seen in this kind of movie, where you have the main point of view from the explorer. It was very clear to me that to make this story unique I had to switch the point of view. There was a character in the journals who had a very small appearance and I found him fascinating, so I started developing on him. But I had to switch something in my mind in order to write him and create him. That took about 2 years of writing and researching to really understand how this character sees the world. Not only that, I also had to make it understandable for an audience. It’s a role that’s so foreign that it’s easy to get lost, and I was really lost for a while.

But then we found the actors. They were really a part of developing the character. They brought their own experience and their own views, and they enrichen the characters through dialogue and action. But I think we were safe because it was a fiction, so we had some liberties.

Do you feel that what these explorers were doing was vital, or did it just contribute further to the colonization going on at the time?

I feel that what they did was vital because, if those encounters didn’t take place, these cultures would have been erased by capitalism and we would have never noticed them. These encounters in the jungle had a really big impact because this knowledge that was liberated for the first time really changed the world during the middle of the 20th century. All of the first ecological movements were influenced by these journals. The writers of the Beat Generation were influenced. For example, Burroughs went to Colombia to see if this was all true. It had a big influence on what became psychedelia and the hippie movement, and also the change of consciousness that brings us today to a world where environmental issues are a thing. A hundred years ago it would be impossible to discuss these matters of preserving other cultures and other languages, or being respectful to these people who, at that time, were seen as primitive, subhuman and souls that needed to be rescued. I think that the journals of the explorers really helped change that.

What made you bring in the concept of the Chullachaqui myth?

During the [research] process, I came upon the Machiguenga myth of the Peruvian amazon. It struck me because I was exploring the German culture at the time, and there was a direct resonance with the myth of the doppelganger. But then it struck even harder because it’s an ancient myth that speaks to contemporary men. We’re living in an age where people are communicating through virtual avatars. It was something timeless that was contemporary as well. It also gave me an idea of how I could find a way to express the feelings of a character who feels that their culture is disappearing and about to be lost. I decided that it was going to be the driving myth behind the film’s structure.

When did you come up with the idea to link these journals together and use Karamakate as the connective tissue?

I was looking at a way we could bring the viewer into a different world or view. In the journals of Theodor Koch-Grunberg, the German explorer that I was inspired by, he came following the footsteps of another German explorer named Schomburgk, who had been there 40 years before. Koch-Grunberg reached a community on the border of Colombia and Venezuela. They welcomed him and, for that generation, he was the first white man they had ever seen. He spent two months there, and all the time they talked about the myth of Surumbukú. After a while, he realized that Surumbukú was Schomburgk. The other explorer became an Amazonian myth, and now he was also Surumbukú. He was the same. So he understood that, for them, there was only one man going back in time every time. He was one soul traveling through different men who are coming in search of knowledge. I thought that was brilliant, and I was excited by that. This was a really great way of telling a story in which time is not a linear thing, but a multiplicity of things, which is the way they see time.

In examining the role of the sonderkommando in German concentration camps, filmmaker László Nemes was preparing to enter his debut film Son of Saul into a long line of auteur-driven projects made in response to one of history’s most devastating instances of genocide. Drawing influence from Elem Klimov’s final film Come and See as well as the horrifying documentary Shoah, Nemes conceived of a project that would acknowledge the horrors of camps like Auschwitz without placing a direct focus on the actions themselves. His movie Son of Saul utilizes a shallow depth of field to obscure the frame around its central figure, the sonderkommando Saul, allowing the intricate sound design and some clever suggestive filmmaking to fill the visual gaps.

“When I finished [reading] the script I thought that finally this was a movie that was going to do it right,” explained Son of Saul’s lead actor Géza Röhrig. “Two out of three Jews were murdered in Europe during the Holocaust and all the movies I saw were talking about the lucky third.”

Son of Saul is an often-brave depiction of the ill-fated lives of the sonderkommando, Jews forced to work in the Nazi death camps. In this interview with the movie’s filmmaker László Nemes as well as its star Géza Röhrig from before Son of Saul picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, the pair talked to Way Too Indie about the movie’s intimate perspective, the challenges of minimalist filmmaking and the responsibility they felt in portraying these events.

The Holocaust and World War II have been extensively covered in films and other documents, what compelled you to explore that territory for Son of Saul?

László: I think it hasn’t been explored. Filmmakers [have] established, over the decades since the war, a sort of codification of the Holocaust film as a frozen genre in and of itself. I was more interested in making a portrait of one man, one individual, to convey something about the human experience within the camp. Within the extermination machine. With all the limitations and lack of knowledge and frenzy that were at the heart of this experience.

I think these aspects were forgotten by films. I wanted to go back to the experience I had by reading certain text such as the scrolls of Auschwitz and the writings by the sonderkommando. Texts that were written during the extermination process, within the crematorium. These were texts that gave us, as readers, the [feeling] of being there. And it was this feeling of being there that was not communicated in cinema, I think.

How early on did you develop the idea of this very experiential, immersive type of presentation?

László: It wasn’t there at the very beginning. It took me years to develop the project and to discuss it with my cinematographer [Mátyás Erdély]. I think the short films [we made together] were a way to devise a directorial strategy to immerse the viewer. But it took years and several steps to design it.

So many other Holocaust films indulge the violent aspects of that war in a way that lessens the impact of that violence.

László: I agree.

Your film does a remarkable job of putting the viewer in that moment without lessening that experience.

László: Yes! Convention is an invention. My approach is that you cannot truly put your finger on the very clearly horrible aspect of the extermination. It has to be in its essence. I think cinema can do it by giving certain limitations to frenzy of this experience. [Violence] can be diffusing in a way and not as clear-cut as cinema wants to make us believe.

You strip down the elements, in a way.

László: We went against that. We went against those effects. It was very conscious.

Géza, as an actor, how does having less going on around you in the frame impact your performance?

Géza: First I had to fall in love with the project. I believed in this movie because I felt this was going to be credible and authentic. I saw that the crew, Laszlo and the cinematographer, basically everybody involved took it extremely personally. They were very focused. So I wasn’t alone in this.

On the other hand, as an actor, it presented a singular challenge because actors imitate. Actors simulate. But with such a distance from our everyday world and the world of Auschwitz, how do you bridge this existential gap? I did lots of reading. That was my primary source. Every single account I could read. Then I had to realize that the less-is-more concept that the movie was applying is true visually, as well.

There’s this very interesting paradox in the movie that, “you only show my face,” so to speak, but the human face is the place where the world and a person meets. That’s why it’s so expressive. On the one hand, it’s a little but on the other hand, it’s the most. It’s huge because there are so many tiny muscles around the eyes and lips that every single thing is on surface. The key for that is just to put myself there and sustain the right state of being. I had to not just understand intellectually but really grasp it with my whole being. What did it take for these people? How is it to live without feeling? I don’t live like that generally so I had to get to that state of being.

Is it a challenge to perform without a traditional, melodramatic, over-the-top moment?

[László laughs]

Géza: No, first of all, László was very strict to kill any sort of theatricality from my acting. I also understood the concept that when people are in a theater they have to be visible and effective to the 30th row, or balcony. This is film. We have a camera that is 20-30 inches from my face. There is no room for routine or technique. I just had to be in the moment as intensely as I could.

How do you work on striking that balance between the intimacy of those moments and the sweeping nature of this story, which takes place in a busy concentration camp with tons and tons of extras at times, without allowing the intimate style to overwhelm the experience?

László: Well you just asked how to direct a film [Laughs]. That’s something that’s challenging, especially for a first-time filmmaker. You have your material but once you’re on set how do you make it happen? I don’t really have a clear answer but I think for this film it was especially frightening. But at the same time we were very prepared and had time for preparation.

I wanted to have a director instructing everybody on set but I knew I couldn’t instruct all the extras, so I had a director friend—who was hired by the production—and he directed all the background action. In this film, the background sometimes becomes the foreground. We are in this very immersed situation so the central action couldn’t be separated from the rest [of the film]. I think it’s how we worked together as a team that made it believable. That was the most challenging [element].

One of the ways it’s so believable is the textured sound design. I’ve read you spent 5 months in post-production specifically working on the sound design, but how much went into the process in pre-production and how much did you work with that along the way?

László: We knew beforehand it would be a long ride. I consulted with the sound designer throughout pre-production and production, but with sound we worked on it in a very organic way. A lot of indications were there [in the script stage] and we certainly worked using a lot of production sound but the more we worked on it, the more it became evident that we needed more human voices. So we had to go and record more human voices in different languages so this kind of babel of languages is part of the experience and part of the film.

What’s the sense of responsibility you feel when you tell a story with such serious, resonate subject matter?

Géza: For László and for myself too, the Holocaust is an inter-generational term. It’s not something that the second or even the third [generation] is learning from the books. We are traumatized by this experience whether or not we’ve experienced it directly ourselves. It’s almost like having a phantom pain in a limb that wasn’t amputated from us but our grandfathers, but still the pain is real.

I feel that this is part of the legacy of modernity—it’s an extremely important thing to speak about, especially the sonderkommando—because there’s a new brand of killers that appeared here in history. People always killed each other, but they kind of took responsibility for it. Here in the middle of the 20th century there is this new type of, “I just obeyed orders, I did nothing wrong.”

There is this distance. The executioners are removed both physically and psychologically from the outcome of their actions. Now the sonderkommando became a software because the killing is going on with drones and pilotless bombers. There is no human sonderkommando anymore and the distance between the murderers who are sitting somewhere underground with a mouse they click and another continent that is being bombed, they are not feeling any sort of consequence just like the Nazis did not face the screaming or the stench of the gas chamber. They left the dirty work for the sonderkommando.

I think it’s an extreme challenge in terms of going into the 21st century. If we are to avoid anything [like the Holocaust] happening again, we have to first recognize we haven’t turned the page yet. Still, the same evil manifests in this world. You can list the alarming frequency of genocides after the Holocaust. The U.N. is consistently incapable to invoke its own genocide convention of 1948. We are still living in the times of Auschwitz. Basically, the driving force behind this movie, is an appeal to vigilance. An appeal to constant reflection.

László: I think we have a responsibility to talk to our world. The new generations are forgetting about the possibility of evil within civilization. The most advanced civilization of Europe, in its peak, killed the entire Jewish population of Europe. So I think it’s true that we have to be conscious of this possibility within humanity. People consider history as a history book. Like history through postcards. But history doesn’t necessarily announce itself, it might just be the present.

Back in 2012, the anthology horror subgenre got a nice shot in the arm thanks to the arrival of V/H/S, a collection of found footage shorts that spawned two sequels and a renewed interest in short-form horror. Now, four years later, the same people behind V/H/S return with Southbound, a new anthology that takes a far more ambitious approach. Comprised of five short stories, Southbound shares both a location and narrative, taking place on a desert highway where poor souls meet terrible fates through interlocking tales. The cohesiveness of Southbound turns out to be the glue that keeps it together, exchanging the hit and miss quality of most anthologies with a narrative and thematic consistency. Much like V/H/S, Southbound is an entertaining collection of shorts that helps expand the storytelling possibilities of the anthology format.

The best stretch of Southbound happens early on with its second and third shorts Siren and The Accident. Directed by Roxanne Benjamin (her directorial debut, although she was a producer on the V/H/S series), Siren follows a small band whose van breaks down on the way to their next gig, but when a seemingly nice couple drives by offering to help, one band member suspects these good Samaritans might be hiding something. Benjamin’s short is a lot of sinister fun, and it’s a great lead-in to David Bruckner’s The Accident. Bruckner’s film is by far the highlight of Southbound, a small-scale piece that follows one man (Mather Zickel) trying to do the right thing after causing a tragic accident. The less said about the twists and turns throughout Southbound the better, since a large part of what makes Siren and The Accident so entertaining is trying to figure out where they’ll end up.

After Southbound’s World Premiere at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, I talked with Roxanne Benjamin and David Bruckner about their contributions to Southbound along with the film’s tight-knit collaborative process.

Southbound comes out in theaters on Friday, February 5th before a VOD release on Tuesday, February 9th.

What do you think anthologies bring to horror that a more conventional narrative doesn’t?

David: I think you can kind of do anything in 25 minutes. You have the ability to go nuts or take risks that you wouldn’t normally take when you have to support three acts. You also get to kind of experiment with a lot of different ideas, like maybe you have a creative impulse to do something and you don’t know if it’ll hold the audience’s attention for an entire movie. The short form campfire tale has a place. When you get into cautionary formats or these kinds of morality tales, you don’t need a lot more time to explore that idea.

Roxanne: Multiple viewpoints, too. You’re getting to work with a lot of people in a short amount of time, and making something together in a more collaborative environment. I think it’s really nice.

Before you decided to make another anthology, did you always intend to go in and change the format from your previous films?

Roxanne: Absolutely. I think with the V/H/S movies we wanted to challenge everyone with the idea of making found footage interesting. With this one, [it’s] “How do we reinvigorate that idea and try to take it to a next level?”

David: And on that note, what would we want to see? If we were going to see a bunch of shorts strung together as an anthology, maybe that wouldn’t be as fulfilling as something that winds together and has a purpose, a certain order or intuitive sensibility for why these things should come together. We were sort of searching for that.

Roxanne: And how to live in one world and make the stories within that world, rather than dropping the audience into a new world every 20 minutes.

David: I was always talking about the idea of a night at the movies where you hear several different voices on a similar topic or idea, so you’re kind of hitting it on different sides. That always seemed like a good night at the movies.

It’s surprising to me that, with so many anthology films coming out after V/H/S, none of these other recent anthologies have tried what you guys do here.

Roxanne: It just happened organically. I can’t speak to the other ones that are out there, but it was something we had done before, so we didn’t want to do the same thing.

David: I think we were interested in finding some sort of connective force to put these things together. I think we also just spent a lot more time on the front end than V/H/S. We were out location scouting together, we landed on the idea that there should be a location, something that ties these things together geographically. That led to a lot of afternoon and evening drives out into the California desert exploring our options. We had a very small budget, and had to figure out what to do to make these things come to life, and just being out on those desert highways together [makes] ideas come about.

Roxanne: And there are easter eggs all over the movie a lot of people don’t know that are tying them together. Little crossovers that…

David: Some of them are excruciatingly subtle.

Roxanne: Yeah. [Laughs]

David: I don’t know if anyone will ever discover them.

Roxanne: But we know they’re there!

So what made you decide on using the desert as your location?

David: It’s awesome.

Roxanne: It’s vast, it’s empty, it’s an ethereal plane of existence. You feel like you’re not quite in reality. Both day and night out in the desert, there’s just so much nothing, and so much opportunity for horror to emerge out of that nothing.

David: I’m from Atlanta, I’m a forest creature. So for me to have that much of a spectrum in my point of view was a little unnerving. [To Roxanne] You actually taught me a lot about the desert because you knew all these locations. You were in some ways my ambassador to California. It was a fun exploration.

How different was the collaborative process on Southbound compared to V/H/S?

Roxanne: Writer’s room.

You all got in one room together and hashed it out?

Roxanne: All the time. For the V/H/S films, our filmmakers were kind of their own entities, and then we brought them together in post. On V/H/S/2 we connected everybody a little bit more by starting earlier, swapping cuts and that kind of thing. On this one it was very much through design, starting with Radio Silence kind of developing the world, [then] everyone getting together and finding their stories within that world and how they’re connected. It’s more like a TV model.

Did you come up with the themes first and find ways to explore that, or did you come up with the ideas and then realize how they tied together?

Roxanne: It’s kind of chicken-egg.

David: It is kind of hard to say. Early on we settled into different things. We knew Radio Silence were going to handle the bookends. I fell into the middle. Patrick’s piece made sense later on because he had a protagonist who knew more about what was going on, and that was a really satisfying turn at that point in the movie. We were conscious of avoiding certain pitfalls like having five act ones in a row. Every time you start a new movie, the momentum dies down a little bit, so we were trying to contradict all of that. You can swing back and forth between having an individual take on something and seeing the bigger picture, and wanting to do something in service of that.

How did you each come up with the ideas for your films?

Roxanne: For Siren, I was working with my co-writer Susan Burke, who’s awesome. I’ve known her for a long time and we have similar sensibilities of this eerie surrealism where comedy meets horror and what those lines are. We were talking about how we both have friends in traveling bands and that kind of era of your life where you’re irresponsible, and you think everything’s an adventure until it’s not. That’s kind of what sparked the idea.

David: For some reason, I really wanted to do a piece with one guy on the phone for most of it. I got attached to that early on. I wanted to focus on a single performance, to have a guy walk into a creepy place and have to act quickly. It really was that vague, and I didn’t know where to go with it from there. There were several iterations of it, and then through the process of talking about where to go, we found a way to make these pieces fit in an event that would hold them together in a unique way.

I really enjoyed seeing Mather Zickel in The Accident since I’m used to seeing him in comedies like Newsreaders.

David: Mather came in to read and blew me away in the room. We had a lot of great reads, and the night after we did those reads Roxanne and I hopped in a car to scout a potential location. I just took all the reads, particularly of the 911 calls, and we listened in the car to actual 911 calls off of YouTube, and then I would just play the auditions. And Mather’s just got us. We believed it, and he took it to a really fascinating place. The piece required a lot of very fast internal transitions, the character has like 5 plates spinning at once. And just from a technical perspective, I don’t know if it’s his comedy background or where he came from, Mather could just move through all of those things in such a fantastic way that could keep the pace of the movie up.

How did you handle approaching the mythological aspect of the film? It feels like you wanted to make sure you didn’t give away too much.

Roxanne: You never want to beat people over the head with that because it takes away that sense of discovery. The fun part for me in early screenings was seeing people arguing over what they thought the mythology was, or when they realized what the mythology was. That’s the most fun part.

David: I think part of it too is that it’s just a fun way to string together these kinds of tales. When we landed on the idea of some kind of hellish haunted highway or however you want to describe it, you kind of come across what you need to come across. So to some degree, the mythology owes itself to each individual character and what their story is. We kind of collected elements together, but I think we never wanted to lose sight of that. We never wanted to be so explicit that we were world building something that could be understood outside the confines of this movie.

I’ve always wondered if filmmakers get competitive with each other when making their own segments in an anthology film.

Roxanne: I don’t think it’s competitive so much as wanting to bring your A-game, because you got a team you can’t let down on top of wanting to make your best thing.

David: I think you get in the mindset of just celebrating something that’s awesome no matter what it is. Wherever it happens, you’re excited to be a part of that. And it’s also being a fan of the people you’re working with and getting to see what they’re doing unfold. Sometimes there’s a thing someone is fighting for in the script that you maybe don’t recognize or don’t understand, and when you see it unfold on set or in the cut you’re constantly going “Oh, that’s what you were doing there.” The medium is so simple, a script is not a finished product, it’s a blueprint for an idea, and it’s not until those elements come across that you really understand what somebody meant. So half the time we’re just listening to each other. Even now, when we screen the film we’ll come out of the film often and go, “I finally heard that moment, I finally heard what you were talking about.”

Radu Muntean’s One Floor Below centres around Patrascu (Teodor Corban), a man who’s made a business out of navigating his way through government bureaucracy for citizens. When coming back to his apartment one day, he hears his downstairs neighbour Laura arguing with Vali (Iulian Postelnicu) in her apartment. Later that day, he learns that Laura has been found murdered in her apartment, but when the police come to question him, Patrascu doesn’t tell them about what he heard. It seems like an issue Patrascu just wants to go away altogether, but soon Vali starts befriending his wife and son, and Patrascu finds himself stuck in a volatile situation he can’t get out of.

Muntean’s film is a murder mystery that’s less about the murder itself and more about the reactions to it, letting viewers try to figure out what’s going on in each character’s head rather than concerning themselves over the specifics of the crime. It makes for a much more fascinating and rewarding film than its conventional plot would suggest, avoiding narrative concerns to explore character instead. Back at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, I sat down with director Radu Muntean to talk about the film.

One Floor Below opens Friday, January 22nd in Toronto, Ontario at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Where did the idea for One Floor Below come from?

I remembered this idea I had maybe 15 years ago or more. I read an article in a newspaper about someone who witnessed a murder. He was listening to a fight in neighbour’s apartment, he didn’t do anything, and then he heard there was a crime there. I was thinking about this, like if he did something at that moment [of the fight], maybe he could have stopped the killing or interrupted the fight. It was inside my head for some time, and then I met a guy who was actually the model for Patrascu. He has the same job as him, and I thought it might be interesting to mix a very in control character like Patrascu with this difficult situation you can’t easily control.

Your last film Tuesday After Christmas also deals with a character losing control, except in that film it’s because of an affair. What attracts you to throwing characters into these kinds of situations?

I’m attracted to putting myself, the character, and the viewer in an uncomfortable situation. What would you do when you’re in a position where Patrascu is? It’s not an easy task because you know he’s not a vicious guy. It’s something personal, somehow none of your business, although society wants you to react very promptly and share all the information that you have. But it’s not so easy. If you’re referring to my previous film, it would have been easier to have a very ugly wife, an aggressive and boring wife or whatever, but she’s as beautiful as the mistress and you have to choose. It’s very subjective.

Do you have sympathy for Patrascu?

I need to try and understand him. I’m not judging him at all. This is not the case. The case is to talk about the notions like conscience and morality. To question [them] in a very direct and sincere way.

It’s a murder mystery, but the mystery is about psychology and motivations.

The viewer has all the information that Patrascu has regarding the murder. We wanted Patrascu to have the 1% of doubt that he could hang on to, that this wasn’t the real killer. Towards the end of the film, he realises Vali is the real killer, but he also realises that he misjudged his actions until that moment.

These underlying aspects are left open to the viewer, but do you know the answers yourself when developing the film?

Yeah, of course. For me, it’s the only way. You have to talk to the actors, you have to make them understand their characters in order to make them organic with their characters. Otherwise, it’s just something glued on their own personalities, and you can see that. I think I was very precise in that I knew where I wanted to get with the film. At the same time, what you interpret as open is the viewer’s way to get to that point, which might be different from viewer to viewer.

I did find it very straightforward in terms of what happens, but it’s still a complex film.

Yes, these are the facts, but it’s not so easy to judge them! [Laughs]

Do you feel like what Patrascu has done, or didn’t do, is more of an isolated incident, or do you find this is representative of something larger or more societal?

It’s not a comment on society. Of course, a lot of people will think this, and I don’t mind it. They always link the films coming from Romania to social situations, political situations, the Communist era, the heritage of that, I don’t know. I didn’t want that because I’m Romanian, I live in that society and maybe I’m one of these guys. I don’t know, but I didn’t want to comment on it. And I think it can apply to a guy from Canada, from Korea…I think that, although you know what society wants from you, it’s not easy to apply it all the time. For me, Patrascu is thinking the police want him to give information, but if this guy killed this lady that he loved, most likely by accident, what can society do? What justice can be made in this kind of situation? It’s very tricky for me. To be honest, you have to question these things because otherwise they are just abstract. They’re just stamps saying you have to be this or you have to be that.

I felt like Patrascu working in this intense, bureaucratic job meant that he knew how much of a hassle it would be to him if he did provide the information and became a key witness.

Yeah, it’s very possible. It’s thinking about his own comfort and family, too. A lot of people in Cannes asked me about what’s Romanian in it, what’s the social commentary. I was thinking about this, and maybe they’re right. Some of the particularities of Patrascu as the male head of the family are in a lot of Romanians. Their ego is quite big. Maybe because of the Communist heritage, the head of the family is not allowed to have weaknesses. And I think this is the main reason he is not telling his wife. Forget about the police. He was listening maybe a little too much near the door, and he didn’t do anything. He doesn’t want to recognize this in front of his wife because he’s supposed to be the head of the family. Maybe that’s the thing. I don’t know if it’s only Romanian.

Tell me about the casting process for Teodor and Iulian.

I first chose Iulian because I knew him, I used to work with him before. I’m doing a lot of advertising in between films so I worked with him. I immediately thought of Iulian and I cast him after we did some tests. For Teodor, I was not so sure because I was initially thinking of a younger character, 40-something instead of 50-something, but he’s very transparent. You can feel what’s inside him even if he’s barely moving. He’s an intelligent actor, he can be very organic with the character and I needed this. He can be empathetic even with a very minimalistic way of acting, and even if you know very few things about the actor you somehow feel his inside.

Does your precision with the film’s form also apply to the actors, or are you more open to what they might want to bring to the performance?

Of course, I have the idea, but it’s not cartoons. They bring their own personality to the film. I want them to understand what I want from the character and I’m open to ideas, but at the same time I’m not changing a lot in the rehearsals. It’s a kind of process in layers, you put layer after layer until the final layer on the shooting. I discuss a lot with them but there’s almost no room for improvisation [during] shooting.

How much preparation went into pulling off the fight scene at the film’s climax?

It was the most difficult thing that we shot. We knew it had to be in one shot because we did the whole film like that, it has to be as real as you can [make], and you have to obtain this without a degree of danger. They could actually hit themselves very hard. We initially had a fight coordinator, but we fired him after two rehearsals because he had very clear idea of how they could pretend they’re fighting. We had a little bit of choreography of how things will take place. We rehearsed with 20% of the power involved in the fighting but having in mind that during shooting we have to use almost 100%, so things can change very easily. The first time we shot it, Iulian was hit in the head by Teo’s foot somehow, so I had to change the way I wanted to shoot a little bit. We did reshoot [the scene] and it was OK, but at the end of the shooting day, I was not completely happy. I wanted even more. It’s the peak of the film, it’s like the Sergio Leone showdown in my way, so it should be very convincing.

Did the rest of the shoot go smoothly given your rehearsal process?

Smoothly or not, when you have a 5-minute or 6-minute shot with 4 characters there’s no such thing as a perfect take. You have to make small compromises. Sometimes it’s for the best, and sometimes it surprises you with really nice things. It’s a very alive process. Sometimes take number 2, sometimes take 20, sometimes take 11, it’s a peak. You feel like you cannot get a better take than this. And if something is not working, the focus, the movement, one of the actors, it’s really bad because you cannot get better. You can obtain only less from that scene. So it’s very alive and, for me, it’s very stressful. Even if it’s not difficult in a logistic way, it was not a difficult shoot, this tension I accumulate on this shooting is really intense for me and the actors.

Do you feel like that tension during shooting might actually help the material?

Who knows? No, I don’t think so. There are situations where you don’t want the characters to be tense.

Your last four films including this one have been written by you and the same two co-writers (Alexandru Baciu and Razvan Radulescu).

I really enjoy working with them. We’re really good friends and I cannot see any reason of changing the team because we’re having a really good time working together. We discover a lot of things about ourselves, and it’s a really interesting and intense experience.

Standing in defiance of the techie takeover that’s been wiping clean San Francisco’s weird, colorful corners and pockets, the 100-year-old New Mission Theater—following a $10 million renovation by Alamo Drafthouse—opens its doors tomorrow, inviting us to dine on high-end finger food as we watch movies of all shapes and sizes within its historic walls.

For its grand opening, the theater will be playing Star Wars: The Force Awakens on all five of its screens. Moviegoers are offered assigned seating and can order food and drink throughout the movie via a silent ordering system involving pencils, paper, ninja-like servers and a whole lot of nervous hand gesturing. Not a perfect system by any means, but all the scrambling adds to the Alamo ambiance.

The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain was founded by Tim League in 1997 and has since expanded to 20 locations across the U.S., the New Mission being the latest addition. League’s hired former Roxie Director of Programming Mike Keegan to run the theater and, considering the man’s prior accomplishments (he’s helped program many of SF Indiefests wild and weird events and once organized a cat video film festival), San Franciscans are in for a treat. Helping Mike ensure the theater is an active contributor to the Mission District community is Private and Community Events Director Elizabeth Duran.

The theater’s adjoining bar, Bear Vs. Bull, will act as a separate entity; you can grab drinks before or after a movie or simply stop by and hang without purchasing a ticket at all. Beverage Director Isaac Shumway and Chef Ronnie New will be sure to keep your belly happy as you enjoy a night out with your buddies and/or significant other.

Sitting in front of one of the theater’s beautiful screens, I spoke with League and Keegan about the future of the New Mission and the journey that got them to this point. For more info, visit drafthouse.com/sf

As far as magnitude goes, there’s no bigger way to open this theater than on this weekend, with this movie.
Mike: We like to live by the seat of our pants, and there’s nothing more terrifying than opening a giant project, years in the making, with unrealistically high expectations!

I think the both of you have done countless cool things for the film community, kind of keeping the game off-balance with your ideas. Talk about coming together to work on this particular project.
Tim: We’ve known each other for a little while. I think we met through a mutual friend—it’s a really small world of people who do this type of programming. Our friend said, “You guys should meet—Mike’s nice!” And this guy will tell you if a guy’s not nice. [laughs] We chatted and Mike had left the Roxie and was out doing cat fancier tours or whatever it was. [laughs] It wasn’t really a formal process. It’s cool in this world because you’re kind of judged by your past work. We liked what he had been doing and thought it would be a good cultural fit for Drafthouse.

I’ve enjoyed your work at the Roxie very much over the years, Mike. This is a great, big new platform for you. What can we expect from you in the future?
Mike: The cool thing is, it’s five screens. You have flexibility because you have everything from a 320-seat room to a 34-seat room. You can basically show the best version of whatever should play in each room. You could play a masterpiece gem in a 34-seat room and do great, and you can have a four-quadrant Marvel movie in the big room. Everyone’s psyched and everyone’s happy. You hope that the audience will get to a point where they’d want to see all five things and that they feel like this is their place.

Tim: That sense is what’s pretty unique about our company, in a way. We’re doing some pretty interesting, almost subversive advertising for people who are watching some pretty down-the-middle movies. It’s like, “You like movies? How about these movies you may not have heard of?” It’s a way of converting a lot of people who may not know a lot about film history to come check out some other stuff after they’ve watched something like Star Wars, for example.

Mike: I feel like, over the past fifteen years or so, there’s been much less of a divide between high and low art. “Content” is a big word going around—people are just open to things that interest them. Whether it’s a stuffy art movie, a crass action movie or anywhere in between. It’s the right time to open a place like this.

With The Hateful Eight, particlarly the road show version, Quentin Tarantino is trying to give people a movie experience they can’t replicate at home. Your company does that kind of work as well. Talk about the importance of watching movies in wild, weird ways.
Tim: We look at ourselves as not necessarily competing against home video. We look at ourselves as an option for people deciding on what to do when they’re outside the house. This experience, from beginning to end, has to be compelling enough for people to choose it over going to a comedy club or going out for drinks. It’s an out-of-the-house entertainment option. Sometimes it’s more over-the-top for us. But I just like watching a movie. The technical aspects, the food and beverage—that’s all a part of just watching a movie.

A lot of the new companies that have popped up in San Francisco have sort of taken over and farmed new money without giving back to the community. It seems like this theater will play a big part in preserving the integrity and authenticity of our city.
Mike: We have a Community Director, Liz Duran, who’s from KQED, Sketchfest and the San Francisco Film Society. She’s on the ground, letting neighborhood organizations know that we’re here and we want to work with them. Kids can come watch movies on the weekend for a dollar. We’re here for everything.

The queso’s still on the menu!
Tim: That’s the only holdout. It’s a brand new menu except for the queso. If you’ve lived in Austin, that’s the number one question me and Mike have been fielding. “You’re bringing the queso, right?” People who aren’t from Austin have no idea what you’re talking about. [laughs]

So this is the first theater in the Alamo chain to have a unique menu?
Tim: Yeah. What we normally do is, we have a core menu, and we hire a local chef in the market and they change about 25% of it or so. Then they work on rotating specials once a quarter. If Hateful Eight is coming out, they’ll make a special menu for it. That kind of stuff. For this one…so many things are unique about this facility. I wanted the San Francisco theater to be very special, so we spent a long time trying to find a chef that we liked and was also a big movie fan. I wanted this to be a dream job for that person.

Would you say you created a dream job for yourself?
Tim: That’s exactly what I did. I was an engineer and I didn’t like it at all. I got there right on time, left right at five and took an abnormally long lunch break. I would leave my door open, you know? [laughs] When I was 21-years-old I immediately leapt into the middle class, but it wasn’t how I wanted to retire. My satisfaction came after 5 o’clock. Now, I love what I do.

I think what’s cool about you guys is that you’re a chain but you don’t feel like a chain. You’ve grown and done it the right way. How big can the company get? How big do you want it to get?
Tim: I set a goal to be at 50 locations by 2018, and then we were going to assess it and see how we did. If it still felt right, we could go bigger. I don’t know. I’m focused on that 2018 number. It’s already gotten really interesting. We were talking to the VP of Disney because they like what we’re doing. We can find smaller movies and open a movie across our circuit. That’s how we started our distribution company. Anomalisa is Paramount, but it’s also a challenging film. It’s going to be hard for that film to find an audience if it doesn’t get an Academy Award. That’s a movie where everyone on the team loves it and we’re going to collectively dive in and do everything we can. We worked directly with the studio. We said, “We’re going to post some numbers because this movie is extremely special.” We want to share it with as many people as possible. You can’t do that as a single-screen theater. Now that we’re bigger, we can make some noise for a movie like that.

Sometimes I go to the theater and I look around, and no one looks like they’re actually present. Their mind is somewhere else, their hands are itching to grab at their phones.
Tim: I think that speaks to why our no talking/no texting policy is so important. Not to sound pretentious or old-fashioned, but it’s so crazy to me what’s happened to people throughout their day. You could be having a conversation with somebody and it feels like they’ve gotten bored with what you’re saying and they pick up their phone and multi-task. Going to see a movie and making this mandatory situation happen where you have to put your phone away and focus on something that’s longer than a minute is actually kind of important, to shut down for 90 minutes and dissolve into a movie.

Somebody asked me, “What do you think about the future of movies? What will movies be like in 25 years?” I want it to be exactly what it is today, which is exactly what it was in the ’40s. I want the lights to go down and you just lose yourself in a story. No bells, no whistles. I don’t want anything more.

Tom Hooper‘s The Danish Girl follows the true-life gender transition of artist Einar Wegener to Lili Elbe (Eddie Redmayne) and its effect on her marriage to fellow artist Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander). Acting as stand-in for one of Gerda’s female models ignites a reawakening in Einar as he discovers he was meant to be a woman. Met with resistance at every turn, the reborn Lili’s only supporter is Gerda, the two of them fighting together to build a life in which Lili can finally be herself.

In a roundtable interview in San Francisco, we caught up with Hooper to talk about the film, which opens tomorrow in select cities and expands wide on Christmas.

The difference between Gerda and Lili’s way of dressing struck me. Gerda is so fashion-forward and Lili is much more traditional.
Paco Delgado is a genius. He’s the costume designer. He’s done Pedro Almodovar’s films for years. We did Les Miserables together, and I thought his eye for detail was extraordinary. We were lead a lot by the photos we have of the real Gerda and Einar. It became clear that Gerda’s eye for fashion was immaculate. One of the ways she paid the bills was doing covers for fashion magazines. What was extraordinary was that Einar was aspiring to a very different idea of the feminine, which was quite bourgeois conservative. It’s actually quite conventional—she just wants to be identified with the other half of the population. I think in that kind of anxiety to be validated as a woman she felt safer in a conventional style of clothing. It’s also interesting to me that the film doesn’t involve Lili learning to be like Gerda. Gerda’s body language is actually quite masculine.

I get quite excited by actors who are good at expressing themselves with their bodies, and Alicia and Eddie are two of the best young actors doing that kind of work.
Yeah, I love that. I think a lot of screen actors kind of act from here up (brings hand to chest). They’re so used to being in close-up [that the rest of their] body goes to sleep. I started to become very aware of it when I was doing The King’s Speech. Geoffrey [Rush] was actually mime-trained and is amazing with his body. I’d be doing close-ups with Geoffrey and I’d go, “Look at what he’s doing with his hands,” so I’d pull back and do a mid shot. Then I’d go, “Actually, I like the whole profile,” so I’d pull back again. I’d come out of that experience thinking more about body shape.

What was very interesting was that, after doing all of these things as a director, you never ever say to an actor, “I’m sorry. At that moment, you betrayed your gender. You were not convincingly a man.” You never say, “You weren’t in gender.” I’ve never actually corrected someone on their gender. The really fascinating thing was having to think about the way gender is constructed. You start thinking about to what extent culture has put pressure on us to take on a certain construction of gender and how much of it is innate. I go around now seeing much more how people have constructed themselves. It’s really affected the way I look at the world.

What was your process with Eddie when you started this journey, turning him from a he to a she?
It started with a lot of research. I was lucky enough to have a meeting with Lana Wachowski because Eddie had done a film with her. She gave us a great reading list, and through her we discovered this book by Jan Morris called Conundrum. It’s the most brilliant book about transition. We met trans men and woman. There’s a great one called April Ashley who was a famous model in the ’60s in London and had an amazing life. We sat with her, drank champagne, had tea time and listened to her life story. We did some early tests on a stills camera, and a lot of it was about this idea that we were revealing Lily rather than him transforming into Lily, this late femininity being revealed. That idea of getting him to that point of confidence where he carried the woman inside him and really start to show it and reveal it was a key concept early on.

I like the way you shot the scene where Lily is posing for Gerda for the first time. It’s like she’s rediscovering her body.
It was a very key scene. To get it right, we were showing a release into anxiety. Obviously, the discovery that she’s making in that moment carries with it a lot of stress and conflict. But it’s also this release out of anxiety and into this possibility of being her authentic self and the potential experience of joy she’d never imagined. In Lili’s memoirs, that’s the moment she talks about as being key. Of all the scenes, I think it was important to get that one right. Her body’s waking up.

Something interesting I read was that Lily often referred to herself in the third person.
In her memoirs, she talks about Einar and Lily in the third person. Eddie and I had long debates about [this]. In modern trans experience, you’d probably talk about “I” rather than talk in the third person. But we wanted to capture this period in the 1920s when there wasn’t an existing language for being a trans person. She was trying to find a way to communicate this to other people, and a way she could do it was to say that there is a struggle between Einar and Lily, and Lily has to win.

Talk about the pool of talented trans actors out there and how filmmakers like yourself can create opportunities for them. You hired a number of trans actors for this film.
I just think it’s a necessary shift. It’s all about equality of access. I still think we have a huge issue in the film industry with equality of access with women directors. It still feels like there’s sexism operating in that world. For people of color, there are barriers of access. There’s a greater fight of making sure there’s equality of actors for people who feel their voices have been marginalized. There’s a great journey to go. I think trans employment is very important. On Les Miserables, my musical director was a woman called Jennifer White. I feel like, particularly in the U.S., there are huge issues of discrimination in the workplace against trans people. If this film in any way can keep the process of shedding a spotlight on those indignities, that would be great.

This movie’s coming out at a very interesting time because of the Caitlyn Jenner story. What do you expect this to add to that conversation?
I speak from a London perspective, not an American perspective, but I think there’s a generational thing where the older generation are perhaps far less progressive in their understanding than the kids coming through now. It would be great if the film could reach those very people who are kind of closed to this narrative and open people’s hearts to caring about Lily and trans stories in general. I don’t know whether it can do that, but it would be great.

Talk about Eddie as an actor. He’s got a one-in-a-million smile, which I think is invaluable in this movie.
He has this great gift where he takes the audience with him on every step of the journey. I don’t feel Lily is “othered” by Eddie’s performance. If anything, Lily’s journey feels inevitable in Eddie’s hands. He has this gift where you understand every step. Not many actors can do that. There would be moments that would feel strange, but he has this compassion. It allowed us to go on a journey that, in theory, could have been unwatchably painful. But you stay with him. He’s also the nicest person on the planet. He went off to the Academy Awards, came back after the weekend and was completely unchanged. He’s the same guy.

Alicia is having such a year.
One of the first things I said to her was, “Because Eddie’s working so hard to be this person, don’t be lazy. Don’t think about how different Gerda differs from you. Can you be as specific with her as Eddie’s being with Lily?” I thought she really embraced that idea. Early on, she had an idea of Gerda having a personality that is more charismatic than she is herself. She’s quite a contained person. Mainly, I was intimidated by finding someone to act opposite Eddie. If you didn’t have two actors who matched each other, it would have been quite tough. I felt like Alicia had such a great, big heart. It’s this love story, and you see how Gerda has this inexhaustible source of love for Lily that helps her through this transformation.

I love Matthias Schoenaerts.
I still can’t believe he’s in my film! [laughs] I asked my casting director Nina Gold if we could ever get Matthias and she was like, “Probably not.” But he said yes! He’s like a natural film star. He’s so still and simple and powerful. There’s a calmness to him.

In a drastic, surprisingly smooth departure from his typical work directing major studio comedies, Adam McKay tackles the dense subject matter of The Big Short, a screen adaptation of Michael Lewis‘ best-selling book about the devastating financial collapse of the mid-aughts. A heavy drama boasting an all-star ensemble (including Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, and more) playing men who watch the world burn to ashes around them from a credit and housing disaster only they saw coming, the film operates in a dark world of complex real estate jargon and impending Wall Street doom. Nevertheless, the film is imbued with a crackling, unpredictable energy a filmmaker with McKay’s comedic and improvisational background naturally brings to the table.

We spoke to McKay in a roundtable interview about the film, which opens this Friday in select cities and expands wide on December 23rd.

As a filmmaker, how hard or easy was it to maintain the balance of making sure your audience understands all of the Wall Street terminology while also being entertaining?
I think what we did with breaking the fourth wall was inspired by Lewis’ book. If you look at his book, he does a lot of footnotes where he says, “You’re still keeping up with what I’m saying. You deserve a gold star.” He kind of talks to the reader a little bit. That inspired us doing that in the movie. I just felt like the movies had to be inclusive. One of the ways the banks get away with ripping us off is by making us feel stupid or bored by financial talk. I wanted to open it up in a fun way because, once you get it, it’s a really energetic, exciting world. I figure if a college dropout who directed Step Brothers can understand it, the rest of the audience can. That was my operating premise. This isn’t that hard—it’s just moving dead money around and giving it weird names.

The balance is a different question. Ultimately I felt like this movie had to be driven by those characters. That’s what drove me through the book—Dr. Michael Burry, Mark Baum, Jared Vennett, the young guys. That’s the meat of this story. They’re us. They’re the people that the rest of the banking world doesn’t respect—they’re obnoxious, they’re weird. There’s also the big question of why they saw [the crisis] when no one else saw it. In the edit room, that was a big thing we looked at, balancing, trying to get the audience to have enough information so that you can go for the ride. But sometimes I’d have to stop the movie and go, “What the fuck is a synthetic CDO?” For the most part, the audiences really love it and feel like it pulls them into the movie more. The only people who have been bitching about it have been super stodgy film formalists.

You come from a theater/improv background where addressing the audience is quite common. Why do you think it’s considered such a radical idea in movies?
There’s definitely a snobbery about it that I’ve noticed. It’s a film school thing. In film school they teach you “show, don’t tell.” They literally do exercises with it. Friends of mine who were in film school talk about how you’d get in trouble if you’d tell and not show. I think it’s become this sort of unspoken rule. But some of my favorite movies of all time involve breaking the fourth wall or using narrators, like 24 Hour Party People. That’s a movie that I love. There’s such an energy to it. American Splendor. Scorsese’s done a bunch—Goodfellas, Casino. You freeze the frame, you talk. That new show, Narcos, does it a lot. I think it’s kind of changing. Early on, there was a power to film in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s where they’re showing. They’re showing a lot. I think now, because there are so many mediums going on, we can blur it a little more. I’m less precious about it. I find it really exciting to [break the fourth wall].

You worked with four A-list actors on this movie. How much direction does each of them require, and are there different techniques you have to use with each of them?
You kind of dial into each actor and what they need. In the case of Bale, he comes to set and he is the character by the time he arrives. But he’s sort of internalized all of the guy’s physical tics and emotional outlook, but we’re trying to find the right pace for it and how much [he] lets out. Do you want to see a full tour de force of what the guy is in every scene? He and I worked a lot on when to use different aspects of the character. We were constantly having a discussion about that. Occasionally, the real Michael Burry’s voice will just get loud for no reason when he’s talking to you, so we talked about when to use that. It’s a constant checking-in with Christian. He’s completely grounded in the guy, but you try to find the right times and places and make sure it feels real.

Carell is very different. Carell almost hunts down the truthful moment like he’s got a pack of dogs. When he doesn’t have it, he gets very pissed at himself. He’s just chasing it and chasing it. When I do comedies with him, it’s not like that, but with this I realized my job was to be like his hunt-master. The two of us would just chase it down. You’re just nudging it and pushing it. When you get there, it’s very cool because he’ll never say “we got it,” but then suddenly, he’s silent. I’ll say “we got it,” and he won’t say anything and we’ll move on. He’s really, really hard on himself in a great way.

Gosling had an odd role in this movie. He’s both inside the movie and outside the movie. He can talk to the camera. So he was closer to a writer-director. The way we’d talk was closer to the way Will Ferrell and I talk. He’s a super collaborative, funny guy. Brad Pitt just came in with this fully formed character. He had the hair, the beard, the look. He knew exactly who this guy is. I was like, “Hey, I want to do this scene in the kitchen.” He was like, “Yup. I want to talk about saving seeds in Monsanto.” Melissa Leo lands, gets off the plane, smokes the scene in fourteen takes, says goodbye, gets on the plane and leaves. It’s like, “Where did that come from?!”

Coming from the world of making really big studio comedies, how easy or difficult was it to pitch yourself to take on a very different project?
You’re one hundred percent right. I’ve tried to make other movies. I tried to make Garth Ennis’ The Boys at one point, and I couldn’t get anyone to make it. That was a case where I went to all the studios in town and I could feel when I was pitching it [them thinking,] “Oh, he’s a comedy guy.” It was a tricky, ambitious project, but it didn’t help that I was a comedy guy in their eyes. In this case, I got very, very lucky. The company that I went to, Plan B, are the coolest people in the world. Really open-minded. The second I pitched my take they were like, “Why didn’t we think of this? This is perfect.” They were one hundred percent behind me from the beginning. And at that point, you have to put up or shut up about the script. When Paramount got the script, they actually liked it. Then we got this incredible cast, so we were good to go. I give all the credit in the world to Plan B for being open enough to talk to me about this. Not only open, but excited to talk about it.

How deeply involved were you with Michael Lewis in translating his book to screen?
Basically, I had lunch with him before we were going to get going. He said to me, “The book was my baby. You take the baby to college now.” He really loved the script. The greatest moment was when he saw our third-to-last screening and just went on and on about it and effusively loved it. Of course, we all reacted like giant geeks!

As a moviegoer, Steve Carell continues to surprise me as his career goes on. He’s always revealing new layers to his gifts. You’ve known him for years—has he always had these dimensions to him or is he really evolving with every project?
I think he’s definitely evolving. He’s got a little bit of Peter Sellers to him in the sense that he’s very meticulous and mathematical in the way he goes about comedy. It’s all very small, precise choices. I always knew he was a very detailed technician. But I don’t think I started thinking, “Oh, wait a minute—he can play these other ranges!” until Little Miss Sunshine. He was pretty frickin’ good in that, but then I thought, “Alright, he’s a good actor, but I’ve always known he was a good actor.” But then he did The Way Way Back. That was the first time I thought, holy shit—this guy’s really good. There’s this anger there and all these emotions. And then, of course, Foxcatcher blew me away. That’s how I ended up casting him in this role. I thought, son of a bitch, I think he can do this. He’s got the anger, he can transform enough. I was knocked over by what he does in this [movie].

What’s it like not working with Will Ferrell?
I can say this: Life is twenty percent less enjoyable. He came and visited us for, like, three or four days on set just because he wanted to hang. We had the best time with him. I always miss him. He’s the best! But I think it was good that we did something separate, you know? I actually was talking to him about doing a cameo, and he was like, “McKay, go do one without me!”

Talk about the pressure cooker of working with Paul Rudd on Ant-Man to craft what that movie became.
I gotta tell you—it didn’t feel like a pressure cooker. It felt like I was in heaven. I grew up on Marvel comics. I met with Kevin Feige and I could tell, “This guy gets it.” Sometimes you meet with these executives and it’s like, “They kind of get it…” The bummer of that is when you write something really cool and they don’t get it. It was so much fun knowing that, if we wrote something cool, Feige was going to get excited about it. We just had the best time, man. It was Rudd and I holed up in a room for two straight months, writing giant action sequences. Everyone assumed I was just doing the comedy, but we rewrote huge parts of that movie. [We got to write] the whole Falcon fight at the Avengers [base]. It was so much fun. I told Feige afterwards, “Any time you need me, give me a call. That was a blast.”

Opening this Friday, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq is a modern-day retelling of Aristophanes’ ancient Greek play Lysistrata set in Chicago’s South side. Nick Cannon stars as the titular character, a drill rapper caught up in a gang war with a crew led by a man they call Cyclops (Wesley Snipes). With men, women and children dying on the streets every day as a result of the rivalry, the gangsters’ female counterparts decide to deny their partners sex until they stop the violence and come to a peace agreement. Led by Chi-Raq’s girl, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), the militantly celibate women hold their ground as the gangs, the police and politicians ponder the price of their senseless dick-measuring.

In a roundtable interview in San Francisco we spoke to Cannon about the film, which opens this Friday and also stars Samuel L. Jackson, Angela Bassett, Dave Chappelle, Jennifer Hudson and John Cusack.

This role is different than anything you’ve done before.
It’s quite different. [laughs]

What was the biggest challenge for you, working on a movie like this?
The overall piece is a challenge, to take something Aristophanes created over 2,000 years ago and set it in Chicago with Spike Lee at the helm…that’s brave, you know what I mean? That’s a challenge because Spike is a visionary, but it’s also taking something that’s so classic and true, and the film’s in verse. [Spike said,] “I feel like you can fulfill this role.” Him making that creative choice, it’s like, it’s an honor, and I’m going to give you my all. Everything I could do to honor the authenticity of the souls in that community is what I attempted to do.

Spike Lee said recently that everything he’s done has led to making this film.
He did say that! It’s true. He came to me before I saw the script, before I heard the full synopsis. He said, “I want to save lives on the South side of Chicago. I was like, “I’m in!” It’s true when he says, “If I save one life, if I bring awareness and stop one senseless act of violence, I’ve done my job.” For all the other films that he’s made that have made strong statements and empowered so many in front of the camera, behind the camera, people whose lives have been changed by this gentlemen…for him to really get connected with the community and say, “We have to stop the killing of our own,” not just in Chicago, but all over the world…that’s a big task. I understand why he’d say everything he’s done has led to this point. He knows how precious life is, and if he saves a life, that’s tremendous.

There’s been some controversy surrounding the film.
See, that’s the thing. I’m all up for opinion, all up for the debate. But I want it to be intelligent, you know what I mean? I want people to understand—it’s a satire. Some people don’t even know what that is, but they want to comment. You’re more than welcome, but understand that satire is what Kubrick did with Dr. Strangelove, what Spike has done before with Do The Right Thing. There were some hilarious moments in Do The Right Thing. There’s nothing exploitative about what’s going on in that film. The same thing is true with Chi-Raq, if not even more. You can’t judge anything off of a two-minute trailer. That’s coming from a place of ignorance. No one has seen it. I still haven’t seen it. You can’t speak on it in that sense. The devil is the author of confusion. We should be upset about a lot of things, but not this. The man is using his art to raise awareness, to create a conversation. Let’s be upset about what’s going on in our community. Let’s be upset that there was a 9-year-old executed in the same neighborhood we shot this film in.

I’ve been coming up with all these different ways to digest what’s going on in the social media aspect [of the film.] It’s as if someone’s like, “Man, look at that Picasso. That don’t make no sense! It’s too colorful! He’s coloring outside the lines!” If you don’t understand what Picasso’s artistic vision was…this is this man’s artistic choice to [use] an elevated sense of satire and a classic tale to portray this story. This is art. He’s using art to evoke change.

Hopefully, once the film comes out, people can have an intelligent debate about what’s going on. There are so many powerful messages in this movie. I think a lot of people are going to take back the things that they’ve said once they see it. That happened with Do The Right Thing. When that came out, people said, “This is going to cause riots. This is bad for our community. It’s a hate film!” And then it went on to be one of the greatest films for our community ever. Spike knows what he’s doing. I’m saddened by a lot of the voices that have come out to speak against the film and haven’t seen it.

Do you think the movie’s trailer is a good representation of the film?
I love the trailer. I think it’s exactly what it’s supposed to be. It’s created this interesting conversation. It’s got people stirred up. That’s what art’s supposed to do. The thing that saddens me are the comments coming from some of people speaking out. Do you see that you don’t sound intelligent the way you’re speaking right now? That you don’t even understand what satire is? It makes me cringe. People who understand satire and Greek theater, they love it. People who don’t understand what art is…I guess we probably didn’t make this for you. It hurts my soul when people say, “They ain’t got no real killers in this movie! It’s real out here!” What?! We know, but we don’t want to glorify that. Let’s tell it in an intelligent way. Spike chose a high-versed style, something most can’t do. People will see that he’s a genius and he knows what he’s doing.

I’m a huge fan of hip-hop culture.
Thanks for that…I am, too! [laughs]

I’m a big fan of battle rap, too. You’ve given a platform to Hitman Holla and Conceited on Wild n Out, so thanks for that.
We got a couple of new cats coming too. We gon’ go in next season. We got two new secret weapons we gon’ lay on ya’ll.

It was striking to me that, in the lead-up to this film, you released a song in character.
Yeah.

And people don’t get it.
Yeah! The crazy thing is, I’ve got a whole album of that drill shit! I’m sitting on it. I ain’t ready yet, but it helped me get into character. Wesley Snipes plays the antagonist of the film. His name is Cyclops. They’re the Trojans and we’re the Spartans. There are these Greek war references but in a drill music fashion. I was like, they’re not ready for it. Hamilton’s on Broadway right now. You can take elements of hip-hop and teach history and show the juxtaposition between love and war. But some of these cats ain’t ready for that. I think hip-hop has evolved. You wouldn’t be mad at Frank Sinatra for releasing a record from one of his movies in character. “That ain’t you, Frank!” Yeah, of course it’s not me! It’s the character I’m playing! When you think about embracing the art, how dope is it that I can release a whole project as a character from a film? I would love hip-hop to understand that we can evolve to that space, but we’re still kinda stuck in that mentality of, “If you ain’t real, you shouldn’t be talking about it.” So Al Pacino couldn’t be Scarface? He wasn’t from Colombia, you know what I mean? He don’t talk like that. But he embodied a character and gave you a piece of art. That’s what we did with Chi-Raq, not just with the film, but with the music as well.

Rappers have been killing people on records for years, but none of them want to come out and say that, really, most of them are playing a character.
You know what’s interesting? Hip-hop has always been about how “real” you are. “Keeping it real.” But none of those guys are really who they say they are! I don’t have no fake name—my name is Nick Cannon, and I’m never trying to be anything that I’m not. I’m happy being this guy. But some of the guys we look up to and call themselves “the realist”—it’s like, yo dawg, you stole someone else’s name, someone else’s whole persona, and you think that because whoever you’re affiliated with you’re allowed to talk tough-guy gun talk? You’re an entertainer. You’re an artist. If you were the biggest dope dealer in the game, you’d still be doing what you were doing! Unfortunately, what has gone on even in the South side of Chicago is, we got it all screwed up and misconstrued. We think, “I gotta really be a killer to be a dope rapper. I really gotta have bodies.” No! We’re kings and queens. Respect life. Let’s focus on that. We can talk about the hardships we’ve experienced, but let’s not think it’s cool to kill somebody to make us more popular and make us more money. We’ve gone down a demonic path if that’s what we’re doing.

Filmmaker Miguel Gomes‘ sprawling six-and-a-half-hour reaction to The Great Recession of Portugal insists its influenced by events that occurred in Portugal between August 2013 to July 2014. A helpful on-screen text reminds audiences of this near the beginning of each of Arabian Nights‘ three volumes: The Restless One, The Desolate One, and The Enchanted One. Despite that, through three volumes, Arabian Nights travels through time, across the country, and to Baghdad. Text is one of the many ways in which Gomes subverts expectations across his trilogy. “I see a connection between the voiceover in the second part of Tabu and the text [in Arabian Nights],” says the Lisbon-born filmmaker. “As you hear the voiceover, you have a completely different sensation. It’s inventing a wall you don’t see. The text here is the same.”

Gomes’ films connect disparate people and elements across Portugal to create a surreal, spellbinding experience. In an interview with Way Too Indie, the Portuguese filmmaker addresses the concept of adapting the “Arabian Nights” structure without adapting the book, creating the sensation of getting pulled in and out of a film, and why he didn’t want to “hit” his audience three times.

Did your interest in “Arabian Nights” predate your desire to talk about Portuguese austerity?
It came before. I started to read Arabian Nights—I never got to the end, though. Because it’s a huge book, but I’m still reading it [laughs]. I do it regularly since 12 years old I think.

My intention was not to adapt any story from the book but [instead] the sensation I had with the book, which is a different thing. It’s kind of a sensation that you’re almost vertical—living in a labyrinth of stories. This kind of baroque structure amazed me when I started to read the book. So for me, Arabian Nights, is like a bible of fiction. You have all the possibilities of fiction—shifting fiction, inventing fiction within fiction—in this book.

And it’s a way to cover a lot of territory. You address so many people from a variety of backgrounds and occupations.
That moment in Portuguese society was very intense and it continues to be—it’s not over yet. People are still suffering the consequences of this financial, economical crisis but I would say that [the film has] the sensation of being alive in that country, Portugal. My intention was also to gather a certain number of stories that were happening at that moment and try to build tales for Scheherazade to tell to the King. Stories about how it is to be in that country nowadays.

There’s also a lot of dealing with the thought process, coming to terms with where society is—from the filmmaker’s struggle to encompass all these stories to the judge who keeps discovering these new layers of malfeasance. They have to come to terms with these elements.
I think every one of them—they have their connection with Portuguese society. For instance, you were talking about the segment of the judge, it has this more global aspect of now having a copy of the Portuguese society in front of the judge. The judge, who’s job is to put order in the world, cannot. She doesn’t have the tools because the situation got out of order. She cannot tell who’s guilty, not guilty. She cannot do her job as a judge. This of course resonates with an issue that’s so important in Portugal: who’s at fault? Who’s guilty?

People try in a very quick way to put the guilt on someone just to protect themselves. It’s a human, natural tendency to defend yourself but I think things are more complex. This is why I had this impression that it would be important to have as many segments as possible because there is not only one way to watch Portugal today, as there is not only one way of making films. So I thought my Scheherazade would be able to tell very different films, to tell and show things in very different ways.

Volume One begins chaotically with all the different voiceovers and settings but as the film goes along it slows down. I wonder if that pace was built into your stories?
It was built in with the editing. When we were shooting the film, we didn’t even know if what we were shooting would appear [in the finished film]. We didn’t know that there would be three volumes when we were shooting. Only in editing we understood that we could control the mood of each volume. This kind of development [of the changing pace] from The Restless One to The Enchanted One was pretty much built in the editing.
Even though I have the sensation that sometimes you have two speeds at the same time. For instance, for me the judge moves absurdly quickly, if you try to really follow the events and the crimes.

It goes out of control fast.
And the same time you have the sensation that it’s not moving at all because it’s all moving in circles so it’s not going anywhere. It’s like not moving and moving very fast. For instance, in part three, in the Scheherazade section, I also have the feeling that sometimes the film goes very fast—she’s always drinking, or singing, going from one situation to the other.

It’s kind of entrancing the way it bounces from sections of extended dialog, or a speech, and then there’ll be silence or just the natural atmospheric noise. Did you try create that sensation of being pulled out and getting pulled back in?
Mostly I wanted have this kind of roller coaster entry in the film [in Volume One] with lots of more radical changes from moods and filmmaking from one to the other. The second one I wanted to be more horizontal. It had three stories and they are different from the first [volume’s stories] that are more up and down and this is like a line.

The final one, it’s the zen, atmospheric film, it has a different construction. You have lots of entries, like in an encyclopedia, and these entries invent for your two kind of communities: one completely fictional, with such absurd characters [in Baghdad] as Elvis the thief breakdancer, and also a community of the guys with the bird song contest that do as surreal things as the guys from Baghdad. Trying to teach your bird to sing by creating [a birdsong] in a computer—it seems quite Arabian Nights. Not quite delirious fictional. So there’s a clash of these two kind of communities with reality and fantasy working at the same level.

That’s the interesting thing when you blend elements of reality and surreality you can accentuate your message with those elements of absurdity.
This dimension is very important in the book. The realistic absurd kind of thing is very important and I really enjoy that. [The surreal] helps reality become more clear for me. It’s important not to try to mask fiction as if it was reality, which is sometimes a problem I have with some contemporary cinema. They make lots of effort to pretend to be reality. To be life.

The place of the viewer in these films is someone who is experiencing real life and I don’t like that kind of cinema. I like cinema where there’s lots of artificial elements and it’s up to the viewer to establish a pact with the film because in the artifice of fiction, there’s always certain truths about our real life. But I cannot also renounce the material world, I think it’s important to have this kind of [films].

I think this last volume. For me it’s like you start delirious like Scheherazade. And what happens to Scheherazade is completely mythological, like myths. It becomes much more down to earth because of the sun, because of the rocks in the landscape. We’re entering the world of Scheherazade and then it gets down to Earth.

I think that then the bird trappers, they do the inverse movement. It starts down to the earth and then they start to get this kind of mythological quality. So bringing the myth down to the earth and bringing [reality] to the dimension of the myth was the proposal of this volume. So for me, it’s always like this fantasy and reality and myth – like our practical, everyday lives – should have a place in the films. They are mixed.

Is that how you interpret the world, with that surreal element?
I think there’s always the world outside and the world that exists in our mind, no? I have to use both but I think we have to be aware of something which is if our mental world, or fantasy world, if we use it to hide reality I think it’s not good. We are trying to run away from things so I think for me it’s important to use both but being really careful with the fact that the fantasy cannot disguise reality.

Is there a version of this film that will exist at 6 hours?
Not really because when edited the film and we cut three volumes, we built every film like it’s a complete film. If you’re at the New York Film Festival, they show one every day. Like Scheherazade telling those stories to the kings, she finishes in the morning and then she continues the day after. This is my way to see the film, I think it’s a good one.

This idea of having the three in a row for me is a little like getting hit three times. I think it’s too violent. Every film has already the possibility of changing to defy the viewer. If you don’t have a little bit of a break and you start to see it continue, I don’t know if this can give you congestion or indigestion. It’s too much. If I would have had it one film of six hours I would not do it like this.

How did you arrive at what the ending would be of each volume? Was that also through the editing process?
It was in editing. Every time we shoot a story we didn’t know anything. Where to put it, if even we put it in the film or in the garbage. So it was in the editing that each end [was discovered]. I would say that for me that the most emotional thing is at the end of the finch volume. The Swim of the Magnificents, with all the unemployed people is emotional and thw ghost of Dixie [is emotional, too]. For me it’s very emotional material and so we thought during the editing of each volume that’s how to end it. It was not simple. Sometimes we changed the stories and it was not simple to get this point.

Catherine Hardwicke‘s new film, Miss You Already, follows Jess (Drew Barrymore) and Milly (Toni Collette), two childhood friends whose relationship becomes unexpectedly difficult when Milly is diagnosed with cancer. When Jess receives news that she and her husband (Paddy Considine) are pregnant, she can’t bring herself to tell Milly, who’s fallen back into bad habits and is struggling with chemo side effects. If you’re in the mood for a tearjerker at the movies this weekend, look no further than this poignant, beautifully acted platonic love story.

During her visit to San Francisco last month I spoke to Hardwicke about the film, which is out in select cities now.

Your movie surprised me.
How did it surprise you?

It was a lot more emotionally raw than I was expecting. I know it’s heavy subject matter, but Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore take it to another level. Really great performances.
We wanted to do this movie because everybody’s been touched by cancer in one way or another, whether it’s through a friend, a relative or whatever. There are some raw moments you go through. There are some intense moments, personal, intimate moments, highs and lows. It’s that experience of real life but with larger-than-life characters, in a way. They’re cool and they’re funny. Milly is a crazy, hot mess. That friend where you know if you go anywhere with them you’re going to get in trouble somehow, but it makes it kind of fun to be friends with them. Drew Barrymore is the balancing act—she’s a little more grounded and doesn’t take any shit from Milly. I love the idea of watching these two friends go through the fun stuff and the tough stuff in life. That was the essence of this: How do you keep laughing, keep living, keep surviving no matter what hits you.

I’ve had a life-threating experience before and I know it puts you in a different place, mentally. It’s confusing, it’s disorienting.
Anger, frustration, humiliation. Your image of yourself changes. It’s a difficult subject to tackle and it was kind of scary for me as a director, a big challenge. But I like challenges. I just dove in. My dad had cancer and he was cracking crazy jokes all the time. We’d go to hang out with him and he’d make us laugh! I love that Morwena kept the zingers coming and kept that lightness. Both Drew and Toni are funny in person and they’re very creative. Crazy stuff pops out of their mouths all the time. Some of the most fun stuff in the movie was improvised. They’d be finishing each others’ sentences, almost like a comedy routine. Even when they’d be experiencing a heavy moment, they’d find a way to make it funny.

The film has a sort of storybook tone to it, especially in the beginning.
Yeah, I think you’re right. Who wouldn’t want Drew Barrymore to be their best friend? She’s so solid and funny and creative and warm. I think we’d all love to have a best friend like that.

I love seeing friendship love stories. They’re too few and far between these days. I also like that the movie never turns into a bitter rivalry between Jess and Milly. Their adversary is the disease. It’s external.
There aren’t that many friendship movies. Drew said to me, “My favorite movies are about platonic love.” It’s so cool. It’s a lasting love that, no matter what happens, if you find your platonic soul mate, you can get through anything. I thought that was great. As we know, there have been a lot of funny buddy movies, but [they mostly center on] guys. They’re infantile and they never grow up and sleep in bunk beds. They’re funny, and they’re talking about that essence of friendship and bonding, but in a very broad-comedy way. True friendship movies are few and far between, you’re absolutely right.

Bridesmaids was about a platonic friendship between women, but I found that movie to be pretty mean-spirited. I feel like your isn’t, though Toni’s character is pretty mean-spirited herself.
She’s got a few issues. [laughs] She admits it. She goes, “I’m selfish. I’m narcissistic.” Bridesmaids is also going for broad laughs, and I loved it, but it wasn’t as grounded. It was fun to try to find that chemistry between the two actors, which they found during rehearsal week and became like best friends. I personally like the guys in the movie. They’re pretty cool. You see a lot of movies where the men, if their daughter gets kidnapped, they get to kill. We get it—men love to shoot guns. Or you have the childish, silly guys who never grow up. But these guys are like real guys you could know and be like and they’re stand-up guys too.

How did you like working with the male actors?
Dominic Cooper—I saw him in movies like The History Boys and The Devil’s Double. That guy can just play anything. He was just very creative and fun to work with. It’s very different from his other roles because he’s really a supportive guy in the movie and he’s a dad. He’s super decent. You think he might go off the rails and be a bad boy, but he’s a good, solid person in this movie. Paddy Considine is an actor, director, writer, musician—he’s multi-talented.

He’s a charmer, too.
He’s adorable! He and Drew were a fun match. Our other guy, Tyson Ritter, who has the affair [with Milly]—he’s so hot! He wrote the song that’s in one of his scenes.

I recognized that.
He had writer’s block for two years. He came out and filmed the movie, and after the first day he went home and wrote that song. The movie [relieved] his writer’s block. He gives me the song and goes, “I think this should be in that sex scene we did.” I played it and it felt really good in that scene! He has great instinct. So, he’s singing in his own sex scene. That’s a rock star’s dream, right? Toni’s husband wrote a song, and the other sex scene that Toni and Tyson have together, she’s singing her own song in her sex scene! That’s pretty hot!

Doesn’t get better than that! What else could you want? [laughs] Could you ever see yourself living on a boat?
After that experience, I’d like to.

Me too.
Didn’t it look fun?

I went to my wife and said, “Would you ever consider living on a boat?” I would do it.
What did your wife say?

“No.” [laughs]
That’s not very open-minded!

I’ve got to take her to the movie.
She’s gonna get charmed into it.

We have to talk about Toni’s acting. She has so many emotions going on within her all at once in almost every scene.
I’ve seen her in many beautiful projects, and when she said she really wanted to play Milly I was kind of envisioning, “Okay, she has to go through everything in this movie.” It starts out sexy and hot, and we don’t often get to see Toni like that. I thought it’d be fun to see her super hot and on top of the world and how her journey continues. How does she handle each step of this major journey she’s on? Toni never did the on-the-nose idea. In the wig scene, she plays it in a way you don’t expect. She’s tough, funny, vulnerable. She’s cocky, she’s lovable, but you want to kill her sometimes! [laughs] We didn’t want to show that someone who gets sick suddenly becomes a saint or a hero. Toni can do anything as an actress, I think. She was brave—she had her head shaved right there on camera.

I love that Jess accuses her of being a cancer bully. Not only is she not a saint, but she’s exploiting this card she’s been dealt. I like that it goes there.
I’ve notice that a few people have really picked up on the cancer bully thing. You don’t expect that, and she just gives it to her! [laughs]

You said that Toni approaches scenes in unexpected ways, and I think she brings that out in Drew as well.
I think this is the best I’ve seen Drew. She’s so real, but she’s very funny too. You just feel her heart. We’ve all loved Drew since E.T.. She’s America’s sweetheart! All of the crazy experiences she’s had over the years kind of come together and you feel her soulfulness, her love, and her spirit. Every minute of Drew on screen—it’s like she’s giving you a hug.

I think some of her best moments are when she’s not saying anything.
You feel her love and her presence and wisdom, too. She’s an amazing person. She manages to do everything with grace and love and dignity.

Suffragette, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Sarah Gavron, takes a sobering look at gender inequality through the eyes of the trailblazing suffragettes of early-20th-century Britain. Carey Mulligan stars as Maud, a fictional composite of several women and experiences of the time. A working woman, wife and mother, Maud gets swept up by the suffragette movement, changing her life forever as she becomes a militant activist for women’s rights. Evading the authorities in their fight for equality, the suffragettes’ crusade puts a strain on their home lives, with the future of Maud’s family hanging in the balance as she’s scorned by her disapproving husband.

In a roundtable interview we spoke to Gavron and Morgan about Suffragette, which also stars Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, Grace Stottor, Romola Garai, Meryl Streep, Ben Wishaw, and Brendan Gleeson. The film opens today in select cities and expands wide on November 20th.

What inspired the project?
Sarah: It was a long genesis for me. I wanted to do it for about ten years. I grew up with a mother who became a local politician. I watched her agency in a very male world. We haven’t learned about suffragettes in school. We just knew the very sanitized Mary Poppins version like everybody did. It’s not a widely known story. There was a really good TV series called Shoulder To Shoulder that made an impact. So, people were discussing it, but there wasn’t a big screen version of it. It seemed extraordinary and such a timely story, overdue in terms of telling the story. But also, it seemed to resonate with the world we live in in so many ways. The two producers, Faye Ward and Alison Owen—it occurred to them at the same time. They had a conversation about doing a film about this, and it made sense for us to talk to Abi because she was the writer who had worked on Brick Lane.

Abi: From my point of view it was very exciting because I had done biopics before, but this felt like a different way of looking at a biopic. We started to focus in and think, “Okay, we could do ‘The Extraordinary Life of Miss Pankhurst’ or Emily Wilding Davison.” But those women will have at one point have a film about their lives. I hope they do. But when we started to hone in on the lives of the working women, there were surprising details everywhere we looked. The police surveillance records, which were only opened in 2003, where you’d see a tiny bit of an interview. Or you would read a testimonial of a woman who had been taken when she took the deputations to the House of Parliament. These women are really interesting because the jeopardy on their lives is so profound. So many of these women were being appallingly treated at work. Their working conditions were just chronic. They tried to manage having working lives and children and they didn’t have a wealthy husband or family wealth. They were fighting for equal pay and dealing with sexual violence. There were so many issues they were dealing with, and they were so profound and so 21st-century.

I started to think, what if we took a woman who was outside of that, in a place of passivity, who didn’t realize just how downtrodden and difficult her life was. And then, through engagement with the movement, moves towards militant activism and change, realizing it’s the ordinary women who change history. Then we though, that might be a story for us all. I think that was when we started to feel like it could be a proper movie.

Talk about Maud. She’s a composite of many women.
Abi: Originally, she was a character I put in the house of Alice Houghton, played by Romola Garai. I had this idea that the lady upstairs was going to fall in love with the maid. Through that, they would emancipate each other. But when I started doing more research and we started looking at the world of the laundries in East London, you started to look at the extraordinary working conditions and the ailments and the injuries these women had. There seemed to be a contradiction from the photos you would see of these laundries, which actually looked quite clean and civilized. It’s like, okay, this is interesting. Then, within that, you realize some of the women in these places joined the movement. When they were in incarceration, they couldn’t pay their bail. They lost their jobs and sometimes their children. That story started to have a real sense of jeopardy.

Sarah: Maud was drawn from these working women. Many of them didn’t write their own stories, but there were some who wrote their own stories, or other people wrote their stories, or you could piece together their lives from police records. Hannah Mitchell was a working woman, Annie Barnes, Annie Kenney—you could find Mauds in the research. It was about being liberated from the biopic.

Abi: It allowed us to kind of create this ensemble of women, so you could find the Edith Ellyns who had perhaps been educated, but at that time weren’t able to pick up their degrees. [They would] marry into relationships where they were really the brains of the relationship and would have entitlement to a business. Someone like Violet had a very abusive relationship, which you couldn’t talk about. It might be talked about when noticing someone’s bruises, but there was no refuge, nowhere for these women to go. I worked on an adaptation of Nelly Ternan’s life, who was the lover of Charles Dickens. I’d already looked at Victorian East London 40-50 years earlier, and to look back at 1912 and realize that so many of these issues that Charles Dickens was drawing upon are still affecting women today, I thought, this is interesting.

How important was it that the protagonist be the total package—be married, be a mother, be someone who has essentially accepted her lot in life and only gradually begins to see that it doesn’t have to be her lot in life?
Abi: I think those are the strains that feel very familiar to us all. I was trying to create a character who was identifiable. I don’t think you have to be a woman who is married. The film is about empowering women to say, globally, there are these huge inequalities we deal with. For Maud, we wanted to create a woman who was not even yet engaged with how unhappy she was. This is a woman who’s been institutionalized from an early age. She’s been abused by her employer, her mother was most likely abused before her. Maud has a scar on her arm, and the idea was that she was there when her mother was burned to death at the laundry. You’re meant to realize this woman has a huge legacy that she has just suppressed and suppressed. Engagement with a group of women who say, “We’re equal. You no longer have to deal with these conditions. Your life can change,” that’s the thing that activates her. It was very important that we created all of those pressures women of today have. They have to bring in money, raise their children, deal with sexual violence or sexual intimidation. They have to find their voice, and the whole point of the film is trying to give these voiceless women a voice.

Sarah: By looking at a marriage at the center of it, we were able to explore the politics of the marriage in terms of the power balance and the parental rights issue and the lack of economic power within a marriage.

It also raises the stakes so much higher.
Abi: Absolutely. And that’s a good point. The film couldn’t just work [politically]. It had to work as a piece of genuine human drama. We were trying to consecrate that jeopardy. That’s something Sarah worked really hard on.

Brendan Gleeson’s character is interesting. I think his conversations with Maud are important.
Sarah: The police archives opened up in 2003 and revealed this undercover surveillance observation, which was so extraordinary because it showed the level of threat the government perceived these women posed. They took this cutting-edge technology to the streets, and it all seemed so intriguing. There are these two Irish policemen we honed in on, and Abi drew on them for Brendan Gleeson’s character. What was exciting was that he was a character who wasn’t single-faceted. He changed and had many dimensions. He was upholding the law, but the very act of surveying those women meant that he was seeing them up-close and understanding their dilemma, actually.

Abi: In fact, that was what was so great about working on this film together. It was actually Sarah who found those two detectives. That’s amazing. We’d be working on a police officer and he wouldn’t feel fully rounded, so Sarah would go and research. I’d written it as an Irish character, but when Brendan came onboard it really made sense. He had his own history he was bringing to the table. So many of the techniques used on these women went on to be used in Northern Ireland. There were so many layers to that journey of making him, and it really is about the fusion of a great actor who brings his own baggage to the table and a director who’s constantly going, “Let’s shape, let’s shape, let’s shape.”

When I was watching the movie I thought about the Magdalene laundries in Ireland.
Abi: It was more about the metaphor. These women wash and clean and restore and get rid of the dirt and stains of London, starching men’s collars. They send them out clean again only for them to come back dirty. It was this relentless cycle these women were in, always trying to maintain order, and yet there was this underlying chaos. You’re always looking for a visual metaphor to somehow have a relationship with the themes of the film. I think the laundry was really important.

The costumes and locations are extraordinary, but the film doesn’t seem concerned with showing them off like other period movies are.
Sarah: We did want to embed it in the period and make it feel very real. We chose a lot of real locations and didn’t do set builds whenever possible. We closed off a central London street for that opening sequence where they smash windows in Central London. We got access to the House of Parliament, which was exciting because it was a place no film crew was ever allowed to film in. We petitioned like suffragettes and they agreed. [laughs] Just to be in that place where history had happened felt like a marker of how far we had come. But also, as you say, we didn’t want to make the locations a character or foreground them. We wanted you to follow the characters through their world, glimpsing life as they did. We created a 360 degree world so we could capture their actions instead of staging it.

What kind of homework did you give the cast?
Sarah: They’d never had so much homework in their lives! [laughs] We gave them these packets. We got the whole team assembled for weeks and were feeding them stuff from the minute they committed. We fed them books and background and took them to laundries and police cells—whatever we could do to really bring the world to life for them. We created these research packages for each aspect of [the story], and that was great. We had Carey on for months and had a three-week rehearsal period.

Abi: What’s great is that the Olive Schreiner quote we used at the end of the movie is from her book Dreams In A Desert, and the book became very important to Carey. There were a few scenes we had to end the movie, and we suddenly realized we needed something that truly symbolized the fact that the fight goes on and that it’ll be the next generation they’ll pass it on to. She found that quote. We wrote a scene where Emily Wilding Davison gives her the book. That’s what was great—she could really go in and participate in that way.

It feels like it’s the right time for this film to come out.
Sarah: We hope so. When we were developing it, it strangely felt like it was becoming more timely, or at least the world was becoming more receptive to these themes and ideas. Abi honed in on this period that felt particularly resonant, so there was there was the police surveillance operation, which echoed all the issues around surveillance. Violence and protest and this journey towards activism, custodial rights, sexual violence. We were also hearing from more women around the world, probably because the digital world was allowing those women to be heard. It seemed the time to tell it. Feminism has also suddenly become less of a dirty word. Hopefully not a dirty word. [laughs]

Based on the life of Stanley Milgram, Experimenter pokes and prods at the mind as the late social psychologist did in his controversial obedience experiments conducted at Yale in the 1960s. The reality-bending film stars the charismatic Peter Sarsgaard as Milgram, who intermittently addresses the camera directly, commenting on his unlikely life story as we watch it unfold. Milgram’s obedience experiments—which involved a subject administering electric shocks to a second volunteer—changed the landscape of social psychology, though Milgram’s career would suffer due to many of his colleagues disagreeing with the ethicality of the experiment. Odd, mesmerizing and wildly inventive, Experimenter is one of the most unique things you’ll see this fall.

We spoke to director Michael Almereyda about the film, which also stars Jim Gaffigan, Taryn Manning, John Leguizamo, Anton Yelchin, and Winona Ryder (as Milgram’s wife, Sasha).

Experimenter is out in theaters and VOD now.

How were you introduced to Milgram’s work?
It’s called Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. It has transcripts from the experiments and a detailed account of its genesis and execution. It was very compelling to me and I thought it would make a good movie. The more I read and researched, I began to recognize there was a bigger scope than those experiments. His mind was reaching past those experiments, but they kept creeping up on him from the shadows.

How long ago was this?
2008. I’d heard of [the experiment] before, but not with attention or definition. I didn’t know how clever, rich and exhaustive it was. I didn’t know he worked on it for two years. I also didn’t realize the controversy and repercussions.

I like the way the movie slips between different planes of reality.
I’m grateful that you say that, but in some ways it’s a pretty straightforward movie. It’s pretty chronological, there’s one flashback, and otherwise it’s really broken into three sections. It’s more flexible than most movies because there’s a playful recognition that it is a movie and he can talk to the camera. That idea was part of the original thought I had for the movie, before House of Cards happened, but not before Ferris Bueller. Talking to the camera has been with us for a long time, but it felt appropriate that someone as self-conscious and self-confident as Milgram would do it. In fact, Milgram made a series of films in which he talked to the camera. Milgram was aware that reality shifts and we have different ways of interpreting things.

Talk about your use of rear-projection.
It was meant to reflect the way that a lot of situations in life are staged, that we’re constantly acting. There’s a level of reality that feels distanced from our more immediate experience. Going to see an old mentor with your new wife can be a play, almost. You’re dressing up and trying to be somebody bigger than you are. Throughout the movie, there are these elements of staged reality where I wanted to be candid about it and allow the audience to see that there’s an element of play and performance.

Peter is very likable in the movie, and I think that’s critical.
I hoped he’d be charming and compelling. I’d known him for a while, and the key to casting this role was that he had to be agile with language. You had to believe he could write a book. Peter’s a really good writer on his own, and I think he’ll be directing movies soon. The last shot of the movie was his idea, and it wasn’t in the script and it wasn’t meant to be the last shot. When we were shooting, he said, “It could be interesting if I tried to wave to Sasha but she doesn’t see me.” I was grateful for that and it ended up being a very poignant way to end the movie.

How did you decide which aspects of Milgram’s life outside of the experiments to show?
Almost nothing in the movie is made up. The biggest liberty I took was that he never visited the set of the made-for-TV movie. I simply took what I thought was compelling. I thought it was pretty organic and cohesive that one experiment led to another and they reflect back on each other and his own experience being a human in a city. We often have these barriers that are unspoken, and he tried to make us more aware of them.

You said you wanted to make the kind of movie Milgram would make himself.
I was trying not to make a plodding, literal-minded biopic. He was a talented filmmaker. He made two films that I think are truly wonderful films. One is called Obedience, which was shot during the last two days of the experiment. It’s very compelling and Roger Ebert called it one of the ten most important documentaries ever made. The other is The City and the Self, where he was roaming around New York with a camera, staging experiments. It’s a city portrait from the ’70s, a very lyrical documentary. In 1974, he was approached by a BBC crew to talk about the experiment and he was apparently so authoritative and compelling that they let him write his own movie [instead of being the subject]. It’s called We Do As We Are Told.

Talk about casting known actors in the roles of the subjects as opposed to more obscure names.
To me, they weren’t that well known. I wanted interesting people who were compelling. I wanted each role to have an impact. Part of the luxury of making a low-budget film is that I asked the best people I know if they had anything better to do, and they said yes. There’s another version of the movie where everyone is more anonymous, but I didn’t think it served the story any better.

I thought Jim Gaffigan was great.
He was an early choice. I didn’t know about him. I’d thought about Philip Seymour Hoffman, who I’d asked to be in about seven of my movies and who kept not being in my movies. He was actually signed, but he got a better offer. He looked like the real guy. Gaffigan was recommended and I started watching these Youtube clips and I was completely captivated by him.

Sasha Milgram is in the film. What did she think of it?
I think she liked it. She’s frail and she’s so supportive. I showed it to her at her house on DVD. What was touching was, at a certain point, when her character comes up she turns to me and says, “That’s Winona Ryder!” She was very excited. She’s great.

What do you think Stanley’s greatest fear was?
I think the real Stanley was probably more prideful than he is in my movie. But at the same time he’s smart and aware of his own foibles. There’s one quote of his I didn’t put in the movie that had something to do with that, to be a good social scientist, you have to have courage. I think, whatever fears he had, he was pretty good at mastering them.

Lifelong baseball lover Eugene Corr’s inspiring documentary  how  follows the lives of an inner city youth baseball team in Oakland, Calif. and their coach, Roscoe Bryant. As a way to provide hope and mentorship to the children in his violent neighborhood of Ghost Town, Bryant founded the Oakland Royals team in 2005. Over in Havana, Cuba, another coach, Nicolas Reyes, has been grooming a team of his own. The two coaches organize a game between the two teams to take place in Cuba and worlds collide as the American youths learn to adapt to Cuban culture. Close friendships are made and life lessons are learned, though Corr’s film also covers the long, hard road coach Roscoa had to getting his team to Cuba.

I spoke to Eugene and Roscoe in San Francisco, where they were promoting the film and its screening tonight at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. For more info on how to watch and support the film, visit ghosttowntohavana.com

Richmond is a Bay Area city that hasn’t gotten almost any big screen time before. I like that you delve a little bit into its history. I had no idea.
Eugene: There’s such a rich history and we just barely touch on it. There’s another film right now, Romeo Is Bleeding, that drills down even deeper into the history of Richmond. But there is a rich history with my father and the baseball team he coached for many years.

Talk about the transformation of Richmond from the ’50s to the ’80s.
Eugene: When I was a kid in the ’50s and into the ’60s, even into the ’70s, Richmond and Oakland were still booming industrial centers. They were labor towns, they were tough towns. I was a factory worker, forklift driver, steel worker, auto worker, crane operator. Around ’73 was when the city was really starting to decline, and I transitioned into film. Most people in the Bay Area don’t know the history of Richmond. It wasn’t like the Bay Area of today.

In those days, baseball was king. From Richmond to Oakland, so many great baseball players came from there—Curt Flood, Vada Pinson, Frank Robinson. They were great ballplayers, Hall of Fame ballplayers. Frank Robinson was the first black manager. They transformed the face of the game. There’s a whole East Bay history here that, with the decline of industry, faded away. I don’t know how many teams Oakland has now, but they used to have scores of youth baseball teams. Levels of participation for inner-city kids back then were much greater than they are now.

Oakland and San Francisco have been going through some pretty drastic transformations over the past few years.
Roscoe: I’m not happy with the changes. West Oakland has become gentrification central. I’ve seen a lot of long-term residents leave the community. There’s a housing crisis right now, and nobody’s really making a lot of noise about it. Out goes the old and in comes the new. In the last ten years, I’ve seen my neighborhood change dramatically. Houses that couldn’t be sold before because they’re in a drug zone are going like hotcakes right now. Ten years ago, the dogs in our neighborhood were pit bulls—now you see a lot of chihuahuas. [laughs] A lot of families that have been there for generations are leaving now. It’s breaking my heart.

Like is said in the movie, Roscoe’s work may not create a lot of jobs, but it gives people hope, which to me is more important than anything during this city transformation.
Roscoe: I enjoy what I do. I really enjoy working with these kids. Sometimes when I’m working I don’t realize that I’m giving these kids hope and building them into better human beings. I just enjoy it. We have our ups and downs—some days you just shake your head, others your heart explodes with joy. I had a kid who went 0-80 the entire season. He couldn’t hit nothin’. We get into our first playoff game, we’re down one run, there are two outs, and guess who comes to bat? Every kid on the team, the parents, they all went, “Oh no!” People started putting stuff in their bags, ready to leave. The kid gets a double, and we win the game. I live for this. He’ll carry that one occasion for the rest of his life.

Eugene: So many of the kids have been surrounded by death and hardship and enormous losses. That kid is never going to remember the 0-80. He’s going to remember that one double.

There were two moments in the movie that sort of stopped my heart. One was when Roscoe talks about a bullet getting lodged in his son’s mattress.
Roscoe: Shootings in my neighborhood were very common. Most of the houses had gotten shot up, but they never shot us up. The bullet in the mattress came from a shooting a block away. It traveled a whole block, came through my house, whizzed by my daughter’s head. If my son had been standing up, the bullet would have got him. It whizzed over his head and lodged into the mattress. We’re not gang bangers. We’re not involved in any drug trade, none of that. We just live in this community. It taught me how quickly our lives can be taken. You don’t have to be in the game to be a victim of it. I’m just glad nothing happened. We got rid of that mattress after we filmed that scene.

Eugene: His house got shot up half a dozen times while we were shooting. Just bullets flying in the neighborhood. His car got hit, the front of his house got hit.

Roscoe: It happens so much, you just put it in the back of your mind.

The second moment that got me is when you’re talking to one of the boys, Chris, a couple of years after the Cuba game. He’s getting straight A’s, and he says he’s doing it for his little sister to be a good role model. That’s amazing to me because it shows that Roscoe is molding these kids to be mentors themselves.
Eugene: That’s a deep bond he feels toward his little sister. I love it. He was a victim of all this stuff, and you see him begin to take agency and control his life. He’s doing good things.

Roscoe: I saw him just recently. He’ll come down to Ghost Town every now and then. It’s beautiful to watch Chris grow. You can see when some of these kids, because of the way they’re growing up, are going down that same road. I’m glad Chris played baseball for me, but I’m also glad his mom moved him out of Ghost Town. He was definitely on-track to be gang banging or following the steps of others he knew. He was definitely going down that path. To watch him grow and be this mentor to his sister meant a lot to me too. Me and Chris knocked heads a couple times, but he’s a wonderful kid.

Baseball coaches, in addition to the kids’ mentors and parents, are really ushering these boys into manhood via this sport everyone loves so much.
Eugene: I think baseball is a slow game, and to learn it requires a relationship with a coach. If it’s a good, positive coach like Roscoe who encourages effort, the kid learns that, if he keeps trying, he gets better. Roscoe’s strong and respected, which I think is essential to these kids. Not anybody could be a coach to these kids. It’s valuable that he’s somebody from the neighborhood who can relate. But baseball is such a joyous game. It’s not over in 60 minutes. There’s a promise of immortality—if you keep hitting, you could play forever. There’s an open-ended nature to it that’s quite beautiful.

Roscoe: I think baseball sets kids up for life. It gives them so many life skills. It’s a slow game, so you need to learn patience and perseverance. You also need social skills. If you want to be productive, you have to get along with each other. Baseball’s also a game of failure. If you hit three out of ten times, that’s a 300 hitter, which actually makes you a stud. But you failed the other seven times. I can’t go to my job and do three out of ten things well. [laughs] I won’t have a job much longer. Baseball teaches you to keep trying, how to deal with failure.

Lenny Abrahamson‘s Room, adapted by Emma Donoghue from her own novel, is an imaginative examination of parent-child dynamics that’s been garnering the Irish director wide praise. Also receiving her share of adulation is Brie Larson, who plays Ma, a single mother who lives confined in a little room with her son, Jack (Jacob Tremblay). “Room,” as they lovingly call their humble abode, is the only world Jack’s ever known, but Ma wants more for her son’s life and hatches a plan to deceive their captor and break out of Room and into the larger outside world.

Room‘s brilliance is all but undeniable. Emotional, urgent, unpredictable, sweet, frightening—the movie is super complex and deceptively simple, not to mention it harbors arguably Larson’s best performance yet. Tremblay matches his older co-star’s talent and, amazingly, acts as the film’s anchor at eight years old.

I spoke to Abrahamson about the film in a roundtable interview during his visit to San Francisco at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. Room is out now in select cities, opens in San Francisco tomorrow, October 23rd, and expands wide November 6th.

You’ve talked about a letter you wrote to Emma Donoghue and the pitfalls a director could face in adapting this story.
Lenny: I thought there were two opposite ways you could go wrong making this film. On one hand, you could make something terribly sentimental where you’re just button-pushing and manipulating the audience to fake emotion. In the other direction, if you go for tough, gritty, bleak and hardcore, you end up with something that’s a bit exploitative and doesn’t capture what the novel’s really about. It isn’t about incarceration. To tell the story as if it were about the incarceration is to tell the story on the terms the abuser sets; we’re telling the story on the terms the survivors set.

I also felt there would be a temptation—given that the novel is told from the point of view of the little boy—to try to find some device or trick or technique to directly copy that to film. Computer graphic techniques, ways to make more magical the things that Jack talks about—somehow externalizing the way the child is thinking. I thought, all that would do is distance the audience from what is the strongest aspect of this film, which is a sense of a real encounter with those characters. You trust an audience brings this empathetic tenderness to characters if they’re well shown, and that type of emotion is way more real and lasting than the shock or sentiment.

I had a wonderful experience with the film because I had not heard about the book or seen the trailer. I went in totally cold. When that pivotal moment comes halfway through the movie I thought, “Well, I guess the ending is coming soon.” I loved not knowing what was going to happen next. Is that the ideal way you’d like audiences to watch the film, knowing essentially nothing going in?
Lenny: Yeah! I think in an ideal world, everybody would walk into a theater without knowing anything about the movie they’re going to see. Obviously there are many reasons why we have to tell people a little bit about the film. Particularly in the case of Room, if all you knew was the very bare outline, you might think, “That sounds a little bit too tough for me.” In fact, what it is is a very uplifting and life-affirming film. To tell that to people is pretty important, I think. But you are still my ideal viewer. If I was Stalin and I could make people go and see my film, I wouldn’t tell them anything about the story! [laughs] Then the film gets to play with your expectations.

Some people mistake the movie’s setting as post-apocalyptic in the first half.
Lenny: One of the great things about cinema is, once a person buys a ticket to the theater, you now you’ve got them for a while. It’s not like TV where they have the remote in their hand. One of the great advantages of seeing a movie in a theater is that it allows the filmmaker a larger canvas to place you in the world at their own pace. There’s something about that opening that puts you in the head of the child. You wake up and you don’t learn anything he’s not bringing you. If at the beginning you really established what the world was and then went in, you’d have already created this external perspective.

What I wanted to do was tie you to the boy. You’re getting these hints that, in the world of his mother, there’s more tension and danger than he’s aware of. That’s really the condition of all parents and children. This is an extreme version of it so that you can really examine what parenthood is all about. Loving parents constantly present one face to their child, which is almost always confident and reassuring, trying to make things that are worrying to them not worrying to the children. In other words, there is an outside world and an inside world, and the inside world is the face you show to your child. Those are the kinds of little permeable barriers that we were really fascinated with. This is a film about being a child and having children and growing up. The rest of it is a way of unlocking some universal aspects of those things by picking this remarkable and unusual situation.

Brie’s career is really starting to catch fire. I think there’s a lot of warmth and intellect to her that makes her special. What makes her special to you?
Lenny: I think you said it. She started acting when she was seven. That process, that transition from who you are and into character, it’s like riding a bicycle to her because she’s done it so many times. She doesn’t have to think about it. What’s great about that is that she has a lightness of touch as an actor. She’s not walking around super intense on set, unable to make eye contact, desperate to keep in character for fear that if she steps out she’ll lose it. She has it so firmly in her grasp. That means, as a director, after you call cut, the person that comes back to you is ready to talk about what she’s just done, she’s ready to talk about alternatives. She’s not saying she can’t play it any other way because “this is how I feel it.” She can feel it lots of ways. She’s a shape-shifter in that way.

Sometimes we have a tendency to believe that the super-intense actors are the only ones who are deep. That’s absolutely not true. I don’t think I’ve seen a stronger lead performance for a long time than Brie in this film, and yet she manages to still participate in the overall conversation about the film. She’s very warm and very present. That’s very important because we’ve got a little boy on set who’s paired with her for so many scenes in the film. You can imagine if she was just flouncing off to her trailer when we called cut or if she didn’t want to play with him. You’d lose what makes that relationship special onscreen. She’s remarkable.

Cinematographer Danny Cohen is very talented. There are some clear cinematic challenges the first half of the film presents. What were some of the challenges the second half presented?
Lenny: That’s interesting. As soon as we got out of Room we missed it a bit, sort of like the characters in the film. In the second half I think the challenge was to over-express the largeness of the world. It’s really tempting to say, “Now we’re out of Room. Let’s have really wide shots.” We shot very naturally when we got out of Room. We don’t use super wide lenses or anything like that. As an audience, you’ve already been inside for 45 minutes. I wanted to say, the world as it is, without me exaggerating it, is pretty amazing. If I exaggerated, I’d be cheating. I wouldn’t be showing you something real. For me it’s always about making those little hints invisible to the audience. As soon as people think they’re being told something, it’s just less powerful.

The Room world is Jake’s normal world. Once you get into the outside world, how do you deal with how overwhelming that is for him? We did use some techniques. We were more likely to do some point-of-view stuff. If he’s sitting on Ma’s knee, we take shots from his point of view through her hair. The cutting style is a little more disjointed. His attention is on these details. Why can kids be irritating? Clearly, in this room, the focus is us talking. Come on, it’s obvious! A kid is just as interested in [some other little thing in the room]! You think, “Can’t you tell what’s important?” The answer is no—everything’s important if you’re a kid.

You’ve found success with this film. Does success worry you?
Lenny: Choice can be paralyzing as well as empowering. The answer for me is that I continue to pursue the things I’m interested in. The hope is that it’ll be easier to pursue now. I feel that some of the projects I’ve been developing for a while are big and challenging. That’s the hardest thing to make—big and challenging. Small and challenging is okay, big and mainstream is okay. Room was a very challenging film to make, and the fact that it worked shows that I can take difficult material and do something with it. That’s what I intend to do for the next few years.

There’s that interesting dynamic that develops later in the film where Ma almost becomes an older sister rather than a mother.
Lenny: It’s something that happens to everybody when they go back to their parents’ house. They go back to whatever teenage version of themselves they were and get grumpy. This is an extreme version of that because she’s literally been plucked out from there and when she comes back, she hasn’t moved on from that 17-year-old self. I felt that the best way of us feeling really worried for Jack was to feel that his mother isn’t this person that is there or him in this really nurturing way. She’s this older sister who’s irritating and clingy. We actually improvised a line that wasn’t in the film: As she’s dragging him out of her bedroom as he’s watching Dora the Explorer on his phone, she says, “Always in my room,” which is what an older sister would say.

Nasty Baby lulls you into thinking it’s one type of movie before revealing its true intention. Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Silva (The Maid, Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus) has no qualms with pulling the rug out from underneath his audience. In fact, he designed Nasty Baby that way specifically. “How much can I stretch the time for my characters to hang out,” began Silva, “so my audience will have the hardest time possible judging them when they commit a crime?”

Telling the story of gay couple Freddy (Silva, in his acting debut) and Mo (TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe), and their attempts to artificially inseminate their friend Polly (Kristen Wiig) while contending with a disruptive neighbor named The Bishop (Reg E. Cathey), Nasty Baby skirts around expectations up through its jarring final moments. In his sit down with Way Too Indie, Sebastian Silva discusses drawing influence from real-life urban landscapes, balancing behind-the-camera duties with acting, and the benefits of introducing new plot elements mid-way through the final act.

Spoilers begin mid-way through article and are identified by the “Spoilers Section” heading.

There are a lot of people in this story who could be considered outsiders, but they feel familiar. Anybody who has lived in a city knows of someone like The Bishop.
Yeah, everybody knows a Bishop for sure. If you’ve been in New York, or any city.

Are you drawing from your own experiences in Fort Greene?
There’s a lot of, I don’t know, beggars or people collecting things. People mumbling to themselves, being crazy in the streets, they are part of the urban landscape. They are there every day. I have experienced that more superficially here. I never got into a quarrel with any of those people. Maybe an exchange of words if they are assholes.

[The Bishop] comes more from one of these characters that I found in Chile. I was in Chile, probably shooting a film, and then I was staying in a neighborhood that is pretty hip. There was a neighbor that lived around there that was very much like The Bishop.

What was weird about him… even though everybody knows a Bishop this one in the movie he has keys to a house. Like, next door. He has access to one of these privileged home. These fancy brownstones in this neighbor. So he’s not a complete invader. He has his place. Nevertheless he’s terrorizing the neighborhood in its own way but it is a very ambiguous character. You don’t know what his business is… This is more based on a Chilean Bishop.

That’s the interesting contrast, Freddy doesn’t think The Bishop belongs but The Bishop doesn’t think Freddy belongs either. There’s a lot of people testing their limits with other people. Were you looking to push these characters outside of their comfort zones?
I feel that all writing is that. You have somebody in a comfortable position and then you give them a challenge. That’s pretty much where storytelling begins. I was not consciously thinking exactly that way just because it seems like a thing I take for granted. You need to push them out of their comfort zone.

The shooting style has lots of handheld, close-up shots, hanging out with these characters in very private moments. Did you want to capture an intimate feel to bring audiences into these characters?
Handheld is mostly what I’ve done in my movies, anyway. The way that I work with my DP Sergio Armstrong it’s always [like that]. On my first film, Life Kills Me, it was more sticks (i.e. tripods) and dollies but after that everything’s been handheld. The kind of stories I’m telling… when you’re telling a story that’s naturalistic, you want to portray some sense of reality to make people feel that they’re actually witnessing a piece of reality. I feel that only handheld makes sense.

Even our heads move. If you’re sitting on a chair, and witnessing something on a street, the way that you see things still feels more handheld than sticks because your head is moving up and down or things get in your way. You never see life as you see it on sticks. Your face is never fixed. In order to reproduce a sense of reality, I feel that handheld is the most effective method.

We also had time constraints as we always do in small, independent films. Going handheld also helps with the pace of shooting. You can move back and forth, do a close-up and a wide in the same shot without ever turning the camera off. It was a movie that was just begging for handheld. I don’t know how else I would have shot this film.

This is also the first time you’ve starred in one of your own films, how much of a challenge was it for you to balance those on-set responsibilities?
It was very challenging. I knew I was not going to have any issues playing Freddy when he’s doing normal shit – celebrating his boyfriend’s birthday, biking on the streets or rock climbing with a friend – I was never scared of playing that part of it. When Freddy has to [do more dramatic, spoiler-related actions] and then react to it, I was terrified of that scene and how I was going to pull that off. I did a little bit of a rehearsal and it was terrible.

I was like, “Fuck! I cannot share this with anyone because I really, truly suck at this.” But then that same fear pushed me to do it. The fear of failure that I could actually ruin this film with the stupid idea of starring in it. It was fun and I overcame the challenge. I don’t think I’m the best performer at all but I think that I look like Freddy. I look like that dude.

The most difficult thing for me that I hadn’t thought of, strangely, was the fact that I was going to be in front of the camera all of the time. I forgot, me as the director, I’m always behind it. We had such little time to shoot the film, I did not have time to look at footage. I was unaware of my performance, really. I would look at some things on the camera when I felt that things were weird or something, but most of the time I was trusting my co-actors like Kristen and Tunde, whoever was with me in the scene, and also my DP who has a really good eye for bad acting. I was among really smart people with good taste and bad acting alertness.

People who could keep you in check.
Pretty much. Also, I have to say, when you’re part of a scene, even more than being behind the camera, you can sense if things feel real. When you are in the situation, there are cameras filming you but you can forget about that for a second. You’re drinking water, you’re interacting with people. If the interactions somehow feel fake you know. You just know because you’re part of it. How could you not know that there’s something odd about it?

If there was something odd about it, I would try my best to overcome that oddness and make it natural. Make myself feel that I was really going through the situation we were portraying. It didn’t feel as hard, to be honest, as I thought it would be but it was definitely adrenaline inducing. At some points you had to delegate your trust to friends. It was a great exercise in letting go and trust.

SPOILERS SECTION

What kicked off your interest in this story?
I think it was the storyline of the Bishop, a gay couple, and the confrontations between them. A figure like The Bishop – an unwanted man in a neighborhood that is really harmonious – and a gay couple with one of them getting really frustrated by the presence of this man then taking the law in his hands by accident. That was the initial idea for a film and it had so many elements, like the crime, the moral question of whether good people do bad things. In the end, if you make [The Bishop] disappear and make this gay couple get away with murder, would the audience hate them forever? Can you make the audience forgive them or have a hard time judging them?

That was kind of the original idea and then it transformed into this hybrid that also mixes in the compulsive desire to reproduce among mid-30s or early-40s people. Why do they want to have babies? How far would they go to have a baby? Those two things then mixed up and created this idea.

Then the Nasty Baby aspect of it, Freddy doing these disgusting performances, came out of a really old idea I had, like, 15 years ago. It was like what Freddy describes in the beginning of the film. I thought that that could be a fun performance, portraying a baby. Embodying a baby in front of an audience and making a total ass of myself, go through the embarrassment of it with other people. Those three things created this film.

You have this trio of characters coming together to form a sort of family just in time for them to face their biggest challenge, I was curious what was the thought process behind combining these two distinctly disparate elements in Nasty Baby?
It’s a very manipulative movie in the first place. I know what I’m doing. I’m adding a very horrifying act for our main characters to perpetrate in the second half of the third act, which is really late in storytelling. By that moment, when this happens, things should be closing out. They should be brainstorming names for the baby at that point. They shouldn’t be trying to clean up blood in a bathtub. It’s a very conscious experiment to make my audience identify or love or understand where these characters are coming from for as long as I possibly can. How much can I stretch the time for my characters to hang out so my audience will have the hardest time possible judging them when they commit a crime?

If they commit the crime in the first half of the movie, the audience is not so involved with them. They will find them completely white, gentrified assholes who are killing a black, mentally handicapped man in a bathtub. But then, by the moment that they do it, you even find out that she’s pregnant. So you’re rooting for them so much that you fail to see the fucked-up-ness and the social injustice of what they’re doing in that bathtub. Which I also have conflicts judging. I, personally, as a writer, even as a human being. I’m not completely sure if I want them to get caught for what they did.

I think that the politics in the movie are really obvious. There’s not much to discuss. We all know that shit is very unjust and sad, but for me it’s more about the moral doubts that I leave my audience with. Do good people do bad things or are they actually fucking evil? These people might not be prepared to have a baby. It could even be seen as a homophobic movie. The moral confusion that’s left by the end of the film is the success for me. The open questions to all of these moral riddles.

I feel like in a lot of films a death loses its meaning because we see filmic deaths so often, but to have this one come so late really hits you
Yeah, you have it so late and you don’t even give the audience time to really process it. All the processing comes at their houses after watching the movie or in their cars or when they’re having dinner. I appreciate that, I feel that it’s something that I’m exploring again in a movie that I want to make now. A little bigger film, where again there is a plot that comes in very late and you just don’t expect it.

Nasty Baby, after they kill The Bishop, everything is kind of an epilog. They get rid of the body and it becomes a sort of urban fable. We don’t care about logistics. It’s not important, like, “How did they get the body inside the car? How come nobody saw them?” We’re not caring about that verisimilitude. Is that the word?

Probably.
[laughs] It’s not important to me, for me it’s more important that what’s eating the audience is, “Oh my god, these guys! We like you! How could you kill somebody? Please, god, let them get away with this. Let them have their baby in peace.” Or, “These motherfucking hipsters. I hope they get caught. I hope the police find them.”

You leave people with all of these questions, all of these expectations, projections, desires. These three people who you bond with, an audience projects all of their fears and sense of justice onto them. I find that to be the most fascinating part of this film, to be honest. If this film did not have that twist by the very end, yeah maybe it would be a sweet movie about three friends having a baby in Brooklyn, but it’s very uninteresting as a piece. I would not be into it.

Do you want all your films to leave that kind of impact?
I hope so. I think that maybe Magic Magic has it a little bit but I think even Magic Magic ends in a way that’s a relief. Death comes as a relief for Alicia especially who is suffering so much in this schizophrenic, paranoid episode she’s suffering from makes her so miserable. When she finally dies you’re relieved, at least myself. I don’t see death as the ultimate punishment, either. There are things way worse than death.

I think Magic Magic and Nasty Baby, and more so Nasty Baby, the morals of the story are not clear. You leave the audience with a lot to chew. I like that a lot. I feel that the movie closes nicely. It’s not a movie that all of a sudden cuts to black in the middle of nowhere. It cuts to black in a place that makes sense. I’m not pushing my audience off a cliff, I’m leading them to an end that is a little abrupt but at the same time, there’s nothing left to say.

It’s not quite ambiguous.
Yeah, it’s not ambiguous. You are left with moral ambiguity. That’s an achievement to me. I hope that’s what people take out of it.

Cary Joji Fukunaga has been steadily building an amazing body of work in his young career. His films Sin Nombre and Jane Eyre earned him the admiration of film critics across the world, and True Detective (a series of which he directed every episode) earned him a rabid fanbase of binge-watchers.

With all eyes now on the Oakland-bred filmmaker, he brings us Beasts of No Nation, a stirring story about a child soldier in West Africa named Agu (Abraham Attah) who’s ushered into manhood by Commandant (Idris Elba), a charismatic rebel leader, after his family is killed in a military raid on his village. The film is stunningly presented with lush jungle imagery and brutally realistic scenes violence that rattle the soul. The observations made on the lives of child soldiers are shocking, but Fukunaga approaches the subject matter with respect and empathy.

I spoke to Fukunaga recently during his visit to San Francisco for the Mill Valley Film Festival. Beasts of No Nation is out in theaters and on Netflix today.

People are very excited about your work and are now following your career very closely. You’ve set the bar pretty high for yourself—your work’s been excellent so far. Is there a lot of pressure now that so many eyes are on you?

Cary: There’s definitely pressure in the sense that expectation is always a pressure. It’d be nice if for every film you made no one knew who you were, took your work at face value and didn’t compare it to Sin Nombre or Jane Eyre. But comparison is also nice in terms of the body of work and seeing how a film fits into it. I’m pretty critical of my own work anyway. No matter what a critic says, I have my own feelings on my work. As much as I want people to like the film, I also know for myself what I’m striving for.

So when people are talking about your movies and shows and you’re all over the Internet all the time, are you so preoccupied with your own critiques of your work that you almost don’t think about external opinion so much?

Cary: No one likes a bad review. Me and all my friends who make movies like to pretend like we don’t read reviews, but we know when people write bad things about our work. It doesn’t matter how many nice things people say about your stuff—as soon as you read something bad, that’s the thing you want to hone in on. You take it personally. It’s also the nature of making something for public consumption. You put yourself out there for critique and evaluation and you have to grow a thick skin, I suppose.

I think you’re improving as a filmmaker with every project. Beasts of No Nation has been gestating for several years now. Was there a point when you almost held off on making the film because you knew working on other things first would benefit the final product?

Cary: Had I made Beasts of No Nation in 2009 or 2010 when I was planning on making it originally, it certainly would have been a different film. There probably would have been aspects of it that would have been better or different depending on my development at the time. Had I made the film ten years from now, it’d probably be different as well. When you make a movie, for better or for worse, that’s what it is. It’s a reflection of your craft, your voice, whatever it is you’re interested in at the time. When you’re writing, you’re so sensitive to your environment. Any little thing can inspire you. Your radar is up and you’re more receptive to things, and that affects what you’re making.

I think Beasts‘ sound design is terrific.

Cary: The sound design was a challenge because we lost our production sound designer about a couple of weeks before we started to mix. We had to start over from square one. Glen [Payne], our sound editor, went to work day and night, trying to put together the sound design. I had a lot of ideas I wanted to try out. For me, sound design is almost if not more important than visuals. It’s part of my fear that when people don’t watch this film at the cinema they won’t experience the film as it was intended to be on an auditory level. If you watch it on your laptop or iPhone, you’re definitely not going to get the sound. The sound was designed to be completely immersive and bring people into that experience of a war itself. To hear those bullets whizzing by, to hear those call-outs, to hear the jungle and the animals—it all gets weaved into it.

I like how surreal the film gets. You seem pretty comfortable going surreal.

Cary: I think True Detective was the first time I ever used slow motion. We did a lot of slow motion, and I was concerned that we were maybe doing too much. There’s objective and inflective camerawork, observational versus when style is implemented for an effect. I’ve always stayed back from doing too much inflective camerawork in my earlier films. Because of the nature of the subject in Beasts, I think you have to be surreal at times, otherwise it’s too brutal. Surreality helps you to not only take in and observe reality, but also not turn off your receptibility to it.

I love the way Idris moves and leans into people and sticks his finger into Agu’s forehead. He’s very imposing.

Cary: A lot of that came from his hairpiece. We tried to figure out a look for him that he’d never done before so that he could really start to disappear into the character. We weren’t going to use prosthetics or anything like that, though Idris even considered something like that. I think the heat of the jungle turned us off from skin prosthetics.

Prosthetics for his face?

Cary: Yeah. We ended up just going with a hairpiece on the back that accentuates the crown of his head. It made him look more like a silverback gorilla. We liked that. The gorilla is a very evolved animal in the jungle. There’s something sympathetic about a gorilla but also something menacing. You want to befriend the gorilla, but there’s not doubt that he’s the king of his domain. I think Idris liked that as well, using a gorilla as a spirit animal.

I like that Commandant and Agu’s internal journeys go in almost opposite directions, with Agu gaining more agency and Commandant losing control.

Cary: That was by design. For me, it was like the death of a father. Agu sees Commandant as he really is. As the influence of drugs and the manipulation of power over Agu becomes less imprisoning, he’s able to find his own voice again. If it helps bring us to his character’s full circle, we need Commandant to fall somehow. Agu needs to see him for who he is. It is a sort of trading of places, isn’t it? But as long as Commandant is out there he has a chance of resurgence.

What was the most challenging day of shooting?

Cary: Every day. [laughs] Every day was so hard. It was a challenge, definitely. It felt like we were compromising ourselves and what we do. It was pretty hard to keep the morale up. For as many unlucky things that happened, there would always be something that’d happen after that that would just bring us right out of the muck. It was very much an up-and-down experience.

You’ve said that you actually enjoy working with children.

Cary: Yeah, I love working with kids. I’ve worked with kids on all my movies, pretty much. There’s something so special about getting a performance out of a kid that’s so unaffected. Abraham in particular is of an age group I’ve only worked with once, in Sin Nombre. It’s a really interesting moment in their time, which is between innocence and awareness. There’s a crossover there where the awareness will continue to grow and the innocence will diminish. If you can catch an actor who has the abilities Abraham has in that moment of time, you get interesting performances.

What’s special about Abraham? What did you see in him?

Cary: It was the observer in him. You could tell that he was a quick learner and that he was always watching. It’s those wheels turning on the inside that you’re looking for. So often you look at somebody and it seems like nothing is going on inside their brain. If you can find an actor with that has that internal life, you can leave that camera on them as long as you want and it’s going to be interesting.

Directed by Peter Sollett and written by Philadelphia screenwriter Ron Nyswaner, Freeheld follows the true story of Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore), a New Jersey police officer diagnosed with cancer, who’s blocked by county officials from passing on her pension benefits to her partner, Stacie Andree (Ellen Page). Aiding the couple in their battle against the county is Hester’s longtime NJPD partner, Dane Wells (Michael Shannon) and a group of vocal gay rights activists. Following in the footsteps of Cynthia Wade’s 2007 documentary of the same name, Freeheld tells Laurel and Stacie’s story not as one of activism, but of love.

In a roundtable interview, I spoke to Moore and Page during their visit to San Francisco to promote the film. Freeheld is out in wide release tomorrow, October 16th.

The script has been around for a while and the film’s finally been made. What sort of changes did it undergo over that period of time?

Julianne: This time last fall, we were shooting it. There wasn’t a whole lot of time between when I received the script and when we started shooting it. For me it was all fairly recent. That being said, it came to Ellen considerably earlier. She was attached right after the documentary won the Academy Award in 2008.

Ellen, you were attached from the beginning as a producer. Did you always see yourself playing Stacie?

Ellen: Oh, yeah. My first entrance to this was to play Stacie. Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher sent me the documentary and I wept. It’s amazing. I was moved by [Laurel and Stacie’s] story. I was moved by their love, their dedication to one another. I thought what they went through was just cruel. I just feel honored to be a part of telling their story.

Julianne, you said in an interview that movies aren’t necessarily meant to change things, but to reflect changes.

Julianne: What I said was that movies don’t necessarily change culture. I don’t know if we know for sure if movies change culture but we know for sure that they reflect culture. People will sometimes say, “This movie broke totally new ground.” You know what? The ground was actually already broken, and we made a movie about it. Sometimes something will be happening in pop culture and a movie will be right there, so you’ll have this perception that maybe the movie got there first. But in reality, culture gets there first. It’s like the Supreme Court. I feel like the Supreme Court usually makes a decision on something once popular opinion has actually swung. They very rarely lead with an opinion—they’re usually following the opinion of the American people. I feel like movies are like that, too.

The Kids Are All Right came out in a time when a lot of people wanted gay marriage to be passed. It showed a relationship that was very much a marriage to many people who hadn’t seen something like that. What do you want Freeheld to reflect back?

Julianne: One of the things that’s interesting about The Kids Are All Right is that they were living in a different place, a major American urban center, living in Los Angeles. They were wealthy. One of the partners was a doctor. They didn’t have a whole lot of political strife within the world they were living in due to their socioeconomic status. That story is also fiction. Freeheld‘s story is true, so when you see Laurel and Stacie, they’re living in a much different world, the most politically conservative county in New Jersey. They’re living in a time before domestic partnership was even passed, and when it was passed, it came with this loophole that allowed the county officials to determine the benefits package. You see a personal story being told within a very different political world and the ramifications of those political decisions on that relationship. It’s ultimately about how the personal is political. What does inequality mean? It means you can’t keep your house. It means you’re not recognized as a partner.

You’ve both expressed how deeply moved you were by this story, as is anyone who’s familiar with it. Were there times during filming when you actually had to stop yourself from crying in scenes when you weren’t supposed to?

Ellen: I had those experiences, more when we finished takes. I felt like it could keep going, like the stuff at the hospital and when Stacie gets the notice that they’re no longer looking to cure Laurel. Obviously, I cannot even begin to understand or have any concept of what that experience is like, but out of care for these people and what they went through there were those moments. I hadn’t had that experience shooting a film before.

Julianne: I think a lot of people on set [had that experience] too. We’d look around and our first AD would be crying, our wardrobe supervisor. People were invested very personally in the story and moved by it, even when they were making it.

Ellen: I think too for gay people in particular, even the smaller things that other people might not notice, like the nuances of being in a closeted relationship, are emotional.

What sorts of things did you do for levity on-set?

Julianne: What didn’t we do? [laughs]

Ellen: She is always singing and dancing. It’ll blow your mind, honestly. She’s literally, up until action, singing and dancing. And then it’s like, “Action!” JULIANNE MOORE. “Action!” OSCAR-WINNING PERFORMANCE. We had instant chemistry.

Julianne: It’s hard to say it because it’s a true story and it’s obviously devastating, but we just got along so well and had a special time together. It was great to have somebody who was my partner on-screen and my partner off-screen. We both had the same goals, the same desires, and the same relationship to the story. [We wanted] to make it feel alive and illuminate Laurel and Stacie’s partnership. That was exciting for me because you don’t always know if you’re going to have the same goals with the actor you’re working with, and we certainly did.

Michael Shannon’s also a notorious prankster on-set.

Julianne: He would turn over Ellen’s chair! [laughs]

Ellen: There was a scene where every time I’d come back my chair was turned over. We call him “Shanny.” We never call him Michael.

Julianne, you’re coming off of a lengthy awards season where you were called upon to speak about Alzheimer’s quite frequently. Now you’re on a press tour talking about marriage equality and struggles for LGBT people. Is that daunting to be a spokesperson for these major issues?

Julianne: Hell yeah. It is daunting, and one of the things I keep saying to people is that I’m not an expert on either one of these subjects. I’m speaking as an actor and a person. You learn as much as you can. The great thing about being an actor is that it does expose you to things that you maybe wouldn’t have been exposed to. You have the opportunity to learn and do research to really figure it out and speak to what it means to you as a person. I always stress that neither one of these situations has been my experience. Like Ellen was saying earlier, you can’t presume to have been through something like this personally. But you do try to give voice to something that you have an opportunity to learn about.

You’re an icon to lesbian women worldwide.

Julianne: Right on. [To Ellen] See? I told you! [laughs]

You said you’d spoken to Ellen about playing a closeted gay woman. What have you learned about lesbian women and yourself in playing these roles?

Julianne: When Ellen was talking to me about her experience as a young woman coming out in Hollywood I was really flabbergasted, really stunned. This guy was like, “Come on. You know all these gay people.” But I said, “They’re old!” They all came out a long time ago. To talk to someone who had recently gone through it [was different]. When Ellen told me that she felt uncomfortable having to dress a certain way, I was like, “Really?” There’s always something else to learn. It’s worth it to hear about someone’s personal experience being discriminated against. You learn more by being told.

What was it like watching the movie with Stacie?

Ellen: I felt kind of concerned for her. I have an emotional experience watching the film. Usually, when you’re in a movie, you’re disconnected from it. You’re never going to feel what you felt when you made it. This movie totally effects me emotionally. It was special to have made it and after all these years be at the Toronto International Film Festival showing it. It’s really special to share the story. But my main thing was concern. I think we all feel concern and care for Stacie and just want her to be protected.

Julianne: She’s super sensitive too. One of the things that’s so interesting about Dane is that he still protects Stacie. In the beginning stages of our research he’d be on the phone saying, “Listen—she’s a very special girl. I love this girl very much and I want to make sure that she’ll be okay through all of this.” I was so touched that, here was this guy, standing sentry over Stacie still.

No one can say that Anne Émond doesn’t have ambition after watching her sophomore feature Our Loved Ones. Taking place over two decades and following three generations of a family in rural Quebec, Émond opens her film with the family’s patriarch hanging himself. From there, she focuses on David (Maxim Gaudette), the youngest son who ends up getting married and having two children as the film quickly moves through time. David eventually starts showing signs of an intense depression as his daughter Laurence (Karelle Tremblay) grows up and goes off to college, and soon finds himself facing a battle that’s similar to the one his father lost.

Émond’s film is remarkable in its unflinching and realistic portrayal of the cumulative power of depression. The way she handles time, and how she uses seemingly innocuous and naturalistic moments between characters to develop such a strong, sensitive and moving film is the sort of thing one would expect from a well-established master instead of an up and coming filmmaker. It’s a bold work, especially in the way Émond is willing to suddenly switch the focus from David to Laurence partway through the film and not lose momentum. We’ve already raved about the film, and after having its North American Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival we were able to sit down with Anne Émond (who’s already in the middle of production on her third feature) to talk about Our Loved Ones.

Tell me about the origin of your film.

For about 15 years, I’ve been wanting to tell this story. I did another film before this called Nuit #1, but this could have been my first film. Our Loved Ones is quite complicated because the structure is elliptical, and it’s a bigger film with a lot of actors, so in terms of production it was easier for me to finance it as a second feature. It’s a very personal story. I think all movies are a little autobiographical, and this one is very autobiographical. It’s quite a dark and complex subject, but all those characters in the movie, I know them. I had the feeling that I could talk about this subject with legitimacy, so I felt that I could truly make this film.

What was autobiographical about it?

That’s hard. In fact, I don’t want to talk about it. I think what was really important to me was to make a movie that people will love and understand and feel even if they don’t know that it happened.

What struck me immediately about the film is how you handled time, and how elliptical the film is. Did you always intend to make the film this way?

I knew I wanted to make a film about life passing by. It’s a film about memory and what parents give to children, so in this way I was sure it would be a long period of time. At the beginning, I wasn’t sure how to tell it. I wrote the screenplay with flashbacks, where we’re in the present with Laurence and then the story would come out through flashbacks. It didn’t work for me. The chronology was more interesting. I think it’s quite cruel because we lose the main character and the film is not over. David is the main character and then Laurence is the main character. But it’s quite elliptical and it’s a challenge. Some people like it, but for other people it’s hard to accept. I tried to make it soft. I think it’s quite a simple story, it’s easy to follow, so I could do these jumps in time.

Did you feel that by having such a large scope it would be more respectful to the themes you were covering?

There are a lot of films about suicide, some good and some bad. Usually when people kill themselves in a film there is always a very precise reason, like his wife is gone or he has cancer, something like that. There’s always a precise reason. But I wanted to make a film about a man who has everything and who just has this melancholy. To me, this is over a lifetime. I want to show a man who is so happy to have children, but it comes with the fact that they grow up, and it’s eventually like a cruel story because you can’t do anything. Life goes by, and you will lose some people that you love. So that’s why time was so important.

You start the film off with David, his mother and four siblings finding out about their father’s death, but you eventually hone in on just David. The only other sibling we really see a lot of other than David is his brother André. What made you want to keep the focus on just one family member?

At the beginning [of writing] there were 13 brothers and sisters. It was a very big family, but it was too complicated to shoot so I chose those 5 characters. I think it’s perfect because you feel they are really close. And it’s important André is there because I think he has everything to commit suicide. He’s the one who’s drinking, he has no family and no job, and he also [found his father] at the beginning, so it’s a little bit surprising that it’s David who’s suicidal.

What made you choose to set the film in the Lower Saint-Lawrence region of Quebec?

Well, I was born there! [Laughs] I love this place. Since I was young I knew those landscapes, and I wanted to shoot them. Nature is very important in the film because David feels safe in this place. He has the river, the house, the mountain, the forest, and in this small area he feels safe. To me, he’s okay, but it’s a small perimeter of security. And it’s important because once Laurence is able to [go into] the world things becomes bigger. She can go to Montreal, she can go to Barcelona, and she can get out of this little place.

David has this melancholy and heaviness in his life. It’s an issue that’s entirely internal for him, and it’s difficult to communicate it to others. How did you make sure viewers would be able to understand what David is going through?

For some people, it seems to work. They feel it, they feel this melancholy. That’s what I wanted. I think it has to do with acting. Maxim Gaudette is quite nice. Even when he is smiling, he has these sad eyes. We started shooting the movie about 2 weeks after Robin Williams killed himself, and we talked about him so much. We watched interviews with Robin Williams, and you can see it in his eyes. It’s easy to see now because he’s dead, but when you look back you see this man is smiling and laughing, but he’s not okay. I tried to give David moments alone in the film to show people he’s not fine, but he cannot say that to his family. He’s not able to share this depression.

What was the casting process like to find Maxim Gaudette and Karelle Tremblay?

It was quite important because this film is about a family. We started with David. I chose [Maxim] because I was completely in love with his acting. He’s perfect to me, and I think he’s very sensitive. And then we chose Karelle Tremblay, but we looked for Karelle for one year. We saw maybe 45 young girls. I wanted a small, blue-eyed blond girl, and Karelle is not like that at all. She’s brown haired and strong and a little bit boyish, but I liked her so much. She’s 19 and has quite a difficult part in the film, and she’s very good.

[Maxim and Karelle] had fun together. They are like father and daughter now. The shooting was magical, all of the cast became like a family because we were on location far away from our families. We were sleeping in small campers for two months, drinking beers and having fun, so we were a family by the end of shooting.

You have a pretty memorable soundtrack with songs like Blind Melon’s “No Rain” and Pulp’s “Common People.”

The songs were chosen at the writing stage. I already knew I wanted those songs. I don’t know how it happened. One night I was with my friend and we remembered this song by Blind Melon. It was like we never heard this song anymore, and we were so happy and dancing to this song at 33 years old [Laughs]. And I thought that’s the song the characters should listen to.

To me, it’s nostalgia. I thought that maybe not every family has this particular drama, but every family has dramas, memories, and songs. I also needed music to [establish] the period of time. I use it for that, and also because they’re just good songs.

The film feels very complex in the way it handles characters. Things are never black and white. There’s a lot of sensitivity toward everyone in the film. What was it like trying to achieve this while writing the screenplay?

It was hard. Nuit #1 was a dark, cruel, in your face kind of film. It was easy to be edgy. I think Our Loved Ones is not an edgy film. It’s quite different in terms of themes and direction. When I screened Nuit #1, a lot of people walked out in the middle because they couldn’t take it. I didn’t want to do that again. To me, the subject in Our Loved Ones is so important, so serious and realistic that it had to be generous. It had to be for a lot of people. But I didn’t want to make this perfect family story. I worked a lot on the writing about that.

Our Loved Ones is currently seeking US distribution.

Adam Garnet Jones’ debut feature Fire Song follows Shane (Andrew Martin), a gay Anishinaabe teen in Northern Ontario dealing with multiple crises, setbacks and tragedies on his reservation. His younger sister recently killed herself, leaving his mother an emotional wreck; he has a hidden relationship with his boyfriend David (Harley LeGarde-Beacham); he covers up his own sexuality by dating Tara (Mary Galloway); and he might not be able to afford the tuition to go to school in Toronto. All of Shane’s conflicts and fears make it hard for him to choose between leaving in order to live an honest life, or staying home to feel secure within his own family and community.

Garnet Jones’ film is the sort of subdued, human drama that feels rare coming from a first feature, and is all the more vital in the way it portrays the very real issues with mental health and suicide among young Aboriginals across Canada. In advance of Fire Song’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this month, I talked to Adam Garnet Jones about his personal connection to the film’s themes, the intensive and fascinating casting process for the film, and what he hopes the future will hold for him as a filmmaker.

Fire Song has its world premiere at TIFF on September 13th. To find out more about the film, and to buy tickets, visit its page on TIFF’s official website HERE.

Tell me about how you came up with the idea for Fire Song.
I was trying to explore a kind of a feeling more than anything. It was this feeling of heaviness that exists after a young person commits suicide, and other people in the community are grieving but also worried that it’s just the beginning of a cycle or cluster of suicides. I was writing different scenes and impressions based on that, and really finding the story by feel from there.

Did this project come from a personal place then?
It was definitely personal. I feel like it was a combination of a lot of different things so it’s hard to pinpoint, but part of it was having been an incredibly depressed, suicidal teenager. And I’ve also seen this kind of common experience of young people who come from reserves and small communities, who have this desire to go and explore life in a larger place. But they also feel incredibly connected to the communities where they come from. I wanted to write something that sort of explored that complicated relationship.

In a lot of films about young people and small towns the story is this young person with a lot of promise from a shitty small town they hate, and at the end of the film they get away from their shitty small town and everything’s better. But I felt like telling this story from an Aboriginal perspective just wouldn’t feel realistic. The relationship to home and place is so much more complicated, and that’s part of what I wanted the story to be about too.

How do you personally feel about young people in a situation like Shane’s, where they have to leave their community in order to try and better themselves?
I needed to leave my home in order to feel like I would be comfortable really coming out and figuring out who I was. I think that’s true for a lot of people, but there are people who feel like they have to leave their community in order to gain the skills to hopefully be able to help it one day. That’s difficult for a lot of people, because a lot of them sever ties to their community when they do that and never return. But there are a lot of people like Shane who would stay if they felt like they could be who they really are and could feel safe in those communities. It’s sad because I’ve certainly seen that happen to a lot of kids who leave their community. Not because they want to, but because they don’t feel safe. They don’t feel like they can be who they really are, so they go to the city and get swallowed up.

Yet in your film you do show there are opportunities for Shane to stay, and a chance that he can always come back. It’s not a negative portrayal of where he’s from.
It was difficult to try to write about a community with a lot of different problems and also try to not demonize that place. In any place there are lots of people trying hard to heal those communities and make a positive difference, and lots of people who are kind of trapped in the negative patterns that exist in those places as well. It was important for me to find opportunities to show the good in that place. There are characters who don’t want to leave, so it was just as important to show why they might want to stay there.

Suicide hangs heavy over this community, and it reflects the very real crisis going on across Canada with young people in Native communities. For a coming of age film it has a life or death quality to it.
It is life or death. I remember when I turned 20 I was so shocked that I made it. I never thought that I would be 20 years old when I was a teenager. I was sure that I would have killed myself by then. I remember that feeling of being a teenager and being so hungry to live my life, to do something with my life, and being equally certain that I would kill myself before I got a chance.

Your cast is made up of a lot of young, nonprofessional actors. What was the casting process like?
When I was trying to fund [the film] a lot of people said “I really love the script, but I have no idea how you’re going to put that cast together.” There are no professional Aboriginal teenage actors that anybody knows of. There might be a couple in the whole country, but there isn’t the pool of talent to make this film out there. And my response was always that the pool of talent is there, but nobody is looking for them. All we have to do is go out there and look. We had general casting calls for anyone, they didn’t have to have any acting experience whatsoever. We saw over 200 people I think, mostly for the parts of the younger characters because I knew that they would have to carry the film. Once we narrowed it down to a group that I thought had promise in front of the camera, we invited them to a week long casting workshop. It was an intensive workshop for all of these performers, and over the course of the week they learned about acting on camera.

It was a really important bonding experience for all the cast members because [almost] everyone who was at that workshop ended up on set playing one kind of character or another. Over the course of that week they formed a pretty tight bond as a group, and when it came to the incredible demands of making the film they had that trust in one another developed over the course of the workshop. They could lean on one another and support each other through it.

Did you have a different approach in how you worked with the nonprofessional actors versus the professional actors on set?
Yes and no, I guess. I did a lot more work with the nonprofessional actors than I did with the professionals. There were a couple of times when I was working with Jennifer Podemski where I stopped in the middle of talking with her and I realized “Oh shit, I’ve been talking to her in the same way that I was speaking with these super young actors who don’t have any experience.” I was over explaining things and getting into tons of detail and just more or less embarrassing myself. That was a learning curve for me. After getting so comfortable with the younger people over the course of the casting workshop, heading into production I had to switch gears and work with people like Jennifer who had a lot of experience. I had to learn to step back and give them a lot less than I did with the younger actors. It was strange and difficult moving between those two modes.

It was more on the sidelines of the film, but I liked the relationship between Shane’s mother Jackie (Jennifer Podemski) and David’s grandmother Evie (Ma-Nee Chacaby).
The casting is a big part of it. Teenagers are so much less comfortable in their skin than older people as a rule, but it somehow gets reversed when they’re in front of the camera. Younger people, even if they don’t have any experience on camera, are much more at ease being themselves in front of the camera than older people. It was much harder for us to find inexperienced older actors who could just relax and be themselves. We saw a lot of people for the role of Evie, and we just weren’t really finding what we were looking for.

Then I was in Thunder Bay during Thunder Pride and happened to be at an impromptu backyard party where Ma-nee was like an important guest in attendance. Partway through the barbecue she got up and started telling this funny traditional story. She had on her big pride shirt and had the whole group of people in the palm of her hand. She was so charming and I thought “This woman has to come in and audition,” and sure enough she was perfect. So because Ma-Nee brings so much of her character and personality, and because Jennifer was such a professional, it was pretty easy to let things unfold between the two of them.

I’m surprised to hear that, since Ma-Nee plays such a subdued character in the film.
There aren’t many queer Aboriginal people on screen, and I was really happy that there were so many people in this film who were queer and made it on screen. Ma-Nee being a really well known and respected two-spirited elder playing this homophobic elder was really satisfying for me, and in a way satisfying for her. She really got into the idea of transforming herself into this character. And I think in the same way that making a film in the north, and making a film about queer Aboriginal people starring queer Aboriginal people really brings something different and special to the table.

I always ask people what they’re working on next, but you already have another film in post-production.
It’s completely different in every possible way. It’s called Great Great Great. It’s a very, very, very micro budget film I made with a long-time and friend collaborator Sarah Kolasky. She co-wrote it with me and stars in it. It’s about a woman who is in her late 20s and has been in a relationship with her boyfriend for about 5 or 6 years. Everything is kind of fine, but because of different things happening in her life she kind of feels like something new needs to happen. She decides to propose to him and they end up getting engaged, and as a result the relationship kind of gets ripped apart.

Do you want to make sure that you’re making films that are completely different from what you’ve already made?
I would like to keep making films with radically different stories that feel different in terms of their tone and execution. I feel like that’s the way I’m going to grow the most. There’s so much hyperawareness of branding in the world of media arts right now that there’s a lot of pressure for directors to develop a trademark or recognizable aesthetic stamp on their work. I just don’t think I have it in me. My interests are too scattered and diverse, and I’m too restless to try to pin down an aesthetic and just keep following that one thing.

While TIFF is known for its prestige and glamour, it’s also a really, really big festival (nearly 400 features and shorts are playing this year), and thankfully that means there’s room for a lot of fun, insane films. That’s where the Midnight Madness programme comes in. One movie screens every night of the festival at midnight in a packed, 1200+ seat theatre for the most rabid fans of genre films.

The man responsible for all the fun is Colin Geddes, who’s been running Midnight Madness since 1998. But in the last several years, Geddes has expanded his reach to the Vanguard programme, which describes itself as “provocative, sexy…possibly dangerous.” A few examples of films Geddes has helped unveil to the world through these two programmes should give you an idea of his influence and impeccable taste: Cabin Fever, Ong-Bak, Insidious, The Duke of Burgundy, The Raid: Redemption and many, many more.

As someone who got their start at TIFF through Midnight Madness—the first film I ever bought a ticket for was Martyrs, a choice Geddes tells me is like “baptism by fire”—I was more than excited to chat with him about some of the films playing in both programmes this year. Needless to say, any fans of genre films (or anyone looking to seriously expand their horizons) should try to check these films out. You can look at the line-ups for Midnight Madness and Vanguard HERE, along with everything else playing at TIFF this year.

Read on for my interview with Colin Geddes, where he details a handful of films from each programme, gives a glimpse into the behind the scenes of the festival, and tells me what he thinks will be the most talked about film at Midnight Madness this year.

The Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 10th to 20th in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and you can buy individual tickets for films at the festival starting September 6th. To learn more, visit the festival’s website HERE.

I know some people who want to check out Midnight Madness but are afraid of essentially picking a really extreme film. What would be a good film for people to kind of dip their toes into the water this year with Midnight Madness?

What we celebrate with Midnight Madness is that it’s just a wild, crazy, fun ride. The criteria for picking the films is very different from the other programmers because I’m looking for a kind of tone and content. This is the last film people are seeing during the day, so it’s my mission to wake them up. It’s not necessarily always about horror films. It’s about action, thriller, comedy…

I would say that the one that kind of represents the Midnight Madness experience the most might be Takashi Miike’s Yakuza Apocalypse, because it is just a gonzo brain-melter. Something different and crazy happens pretty much every five minutes. It’s a whole bunch of half-baked ideas happening in the film, but that’s kind of the fun of it. Takashi Miike is, in many respects, the godfather of the Midnight Madness programme. No other director has had as many films selected for Midnight Madness, and it looks like we’re actually going to have him here, something he hasn’t done since I think 2000. It’s gonna be nice to have him back.

Yakuza Apocalypse

And what would be a good film for someone who wants to get thrown in the deep end?

On the other end of the spectrum in Midnight Madness, if you want the baptism by fire, go hard or go home, there are two films. The first would be Baskin, which is a descent into hell from Turkey. I’m pretty proud that we have our first entry from Turkey in Midnight Madness this year. This one’s gonna have just as much of an effect on people as Martyrs potentially did. But the other one, which is also really intense but in a fun way, is Hardcore. It’s a Russian-American co-production, and it’s the first POV action film. I can safely say that it’s like the Blair Witch of action films.

Can you talk about the opening and closing films Green Room and The Final Girls? What made you choose them as bookends for the programme this year?

What I strive to do with Midnight Madness is to get underdog films as much as I can. I actually veer away from big studio films. They can be fun and all, but I’d rather showcase a film from Japan or Turkey, somewhere you’re probably not going to see [the film] with that much energy. But then, at the same time, in order to properly champion those films, the programme always benefits by a couple of what you call tentpole films. So, if a newspaper article writes about Patrick Stewart in Green Room, then they’re also going to write about Baskin or Southbound or one of the smaller films. It’s important to have those in the mix, but I’m very selective on what I do. I just felt Green Room was a really sharp, fun thriller.

And with Final Girls, when I do a closing film, it’s a little more tricky just because of the kind of pedigree of premiere status. And it’s harder sometimes to have a world premiere at the end of the festival because that’s when the bulk of the media and the industry have probably left, so it’s hard for me to do a premiere at the end. But when I saw Final Girls the premiere status had already been broken, and I realized “You know what? Closing night!” Thematically, Final Girls is an excellent fit for the final night, and it’s also nice to end the programme on a humourous high.

Green Room

Midnight Madness has established a lot of new filmmakers to audiences over the years. Do you have a particularly fond memory of a filmmaker you helped introduce through Midnight Madness?

I really take pride in being able to introduce audiences to Ong-Bak. Thai Cinema has had a rich history, but it’s a rich history which hasn’t really been known outside of its own country. And literally overnight we were able to introduce the world to the first Thai film star who became internationally recognized. Who knew from when we first screened Ong-Bak that, years later, Tony Jaa would be in a Fast & Furious film? And then repeating the same thing with The Raid: Redemption. I like to take pride that we probably brought the biggest audience anywhere in North America for an Indonesian film.

What can you tell me about Southbound? When you announced it, very little was known about the film.

Southbound is an anthology film, but as opposed to something like V/H/S which had an interlinking episode, in this film, the stories all interlock with one another. It’s kind of seamless, where one story ends and it moves into the beginning of the next story. It does have some of the directors who have done films for V/H/S including the collective Radio Silence and David Bruckner. It also has a female director, Roxanne Benjamin, who’s made a really fun segment. And a female director in Midnight Madness…Even within the guys of the anthology, I’m really proud to be able to do that. There aren’t a lot of female directors working in genre at the moment, but that’s slowly starting to change. To be able to help usher in a new voice into genre is really exciting.

I could ask about every film in the programme, but I’ll ask about one more: I’m really interested in the short film The Chickening, which I guess is the real opening film since it will play before Green Room.

[Laughs] The Chickening came to me from…I got a link from a good friend, but I didn’t take the link seriously. The e-mail sat in my inbox for a couple of weeks before I watched [it]. It’s kind of similar to if you have friends in bands. You’re kind of like “Ugh, here’s their new album, is it gonna be good or bad?” It’s the same with films. When I put The Chickening on my jaw dropped. It is one of the craziest, freakiest, fun things I’ve seen, and in many respects the less said about The Chickening the better. The Chickening is, I think, going to be one of the most talked about films in Midnight Madness, and it’s only 5 minutes long.

The Chickening

Moving on from Midnight Madness to Vanguard now, I feel like Vanguard is a really vital programme in a lot of ways. Aside from genre festivals, I don’t really see many major festivals around the world profiling the kind of in-between genre films that Vanguard shows off.

Yeah, that’s exactly it. In many ways, I can single you out as a poster child of how the TIFF experience goes. Midnight Madness is the gateway drug for people. That’s how it was for me. I stood in line for the first year of Midnight Madness, and after that, I started seeing more films within the festival. People can get kind of intimidated or scared off by art films or foreign films, but everyone can accept a horror film or an action film. But as the audience grows and matures, so do their tastes. And so I really feel that Vanguard is almost the older, cooler sister of Midnight Madness. These are where we can find films that intersect within genre and arthouse. It’s a fun programme to see the people who are taking it to heart. I used to be a Midnight Madness fan, and now I’m a Vanguard fan.

I did want to talk about what might be the most hyped up titles in Vanguard this year, which I’m referring to as TIFF’s power couple: Gaspar Noe’s Love and Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution.

Oh, I’m so glad you caught on to that! I mean Gaspar and Lucile are in many ways cinematic opposites. Whereas Gaspar deals with the extremities, Lucile deals with the intimacies. It’s quite fascinating. I mean Love, there’s not much to be said about Love: It’s a 3D porn film. Or, more appropriately, it’s a love story, and those sequences of physical love are in 3D.

But Evolution is a little bit more of a hard nut to crack because it’s a sublime, body horror, fairy tale mystery. There are no easy answers in this one, but it is beautiful, lush and so engaging. Come and get ready to dive into that film. The imagery is just going to wash over you and slowly get under your skin. When people come out of Evolution they’re going to be talking about it.

Evolution

There are some interesting U.S. indies in Vanguard this year like Missing Girl, which stars Robert Longstreet and Kevin Corrigan, and Oz Perkins’ February.

It’s great because Longstreet is the lead, and it’s so nice to finally see a film that he’s carrying. Missing Girl is a fun, quirky indie. Quirky also works within Vanguard. This is almost a Ghost World-esque thriller in a minor key. It’s got some great performances, and it’s got this likable character who you’re concerned about. It’s a really nice, small, controlled universe. 

And February is a kind of beautiful, sublime horror film. When I sat down and watched the film I wasn’t really sure where it was going, and then there’s a certain point where everything just clicked for me and I was along for the ride. It’s just kind of an awkward coming of age story that takes some very demonic twists.

When you’re programming films, does that moment you’re talking about where everything falls in place kind of entice you? Is that something you seek for when you’re watching things.

Yeah. Personally, for me, I like films where I don’t know where they’re going. I like going down a path that kind of twists and turns. Another example is Demon from Poland. That’s a film that I didn’t know much about. I tracked it down based on the name alone. And it was so rich and rewarding to see a film where I couldn’t predict what the outcome was. It’s also refreshing to see a tale from another part of the world. I’m at the whims of whatever the market gives me, but I try to do as many non-American films as I can. So to be able to discover and put a film from Poland in Vanguard makes me really happy.

Demon

Alex de la Iglesia was last seen in Midnight Madness with Witching and Bitching, and this year he’s in Vanguard with My Great Night. It looks a lot different from Witching and Bitching, but it still looks pretty wild.

It’s totally wild, yeah. This is a film that could have fit in Midnight Madness. There’s a definite madcap energy to it. It’s just about the filming of a New Year’s special in Spain and all the crazy people in the televised special. It’s like a long, drunk, crazy party. It’s as funny as Alex de la Iglesia’s other films. Diana Sanchez—the programmer who selected it—and I had a big talk about it. She was worried that the audience might not recognize some of the cultural references. I was like “No, this is totally going to work.” This is classic Alex, and anyone who’s in for this is totally in for this ride.

I think Midnight Madness and Vanguard have a unique quality compared to other programmes in the fest where you’re kind of the face of these programmes. Throughout the year, when you do this selection process for the programmes, how much of it is you and how much is more of a collaborative process with other people behind the scenes?

Midnight Madness is pretty much carte blanche for me, it’s all of my picks. But Vanguard is a collaborative process with the other programmers. I’ll see something, or they’ll see something, and we’ll meet or discuss whether or not we feel it might fit into Vanguard. A good example of this is Collective Invention from South Korea. I had watched it, and my selections were already full, so I immediately sent it over to our Asian programmer Giovanna Fulvi and said, “You have to see this.” It has the same kind of mad spark of genius we saw with some films at the beginning of the new wave of Korean cinema, like Save the Green Planet or The Foul King. It’s a perfect Vanguard film. She saw it and embraced it, and that’s how it ended up in Vanguard.

Finally, outside of the films in Midnight Madness and Vanguard, what is a film that you personally want to see badly?

High-Rise, Ben Wheatley’s film. I haven’t had a chance to see it. It’s in the Platform section. I’ve read the book, and when Wheatley was here for A Field in England he was telling me what he was going to be doing with the film. I’m so excited to see that one. Hopefully I’ll check it out before the festival. Otherwise I’m just gonna have to skip my duties and run and catch a screening while it’s on.

The “Shark’s Fin” route up Meru Peak in the Indian Himalaya is considered one of the most difficult climbs in the world. Mountaineers Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk attempted twice to ascend to the 21,000-foot peak (in 2008 and again in 2011), and thankfully for us, they brought cameras with them. Meru is a terrifying, deeply moving documentary about trust, friendship, mentorship, and the fortitude required to conquer one of the most treacherous feats in all of alpinism. Chin directed the film and brought his documentarian wife, E. Chai Vasarhelyi, to co-direct and edit the breathtaking footage. It’s a more personal, human story than the typical mountaineering doc, as it focuses on the bond between the three climbers more than anything else.

I spoke with Jimmy, Chai, and Conrad about their vision for the film, which is out in select theaters this week. For more information on the film, visit merufilm.com

This story definitely falls under the “stranger than fiction” category. I couldn’t believe what I was watching.
Jimmy: I think a lot of people have said something to that effect. They say that you couldn’t write it if you tried.

I’m a film critic who spends a lot of time in front of a computer screen. I could never imagine doing something so bold as what you guys did. What’s different about the way your mind works that allows you to do what you do?
Conrad: Starting out at a young age, you have a successful camping trip. Then you want to do a little more, so you hike to the top of a mountain. Next thing you know, you’ve got ropes and you’re taking trips to Mount Rainier and Alaska and the Himalayas. Each time you build upon the previous experience you get better at it. Eventually, you have a mission like Meru, which was a personal goal for me that was a real treat to share with Jimmy and Renan. I’m honored that Chai and Jimmy and their team made it into a story, because I’m not a filmmaker. [laughs]

Climbing and mountaineering is deeply personal and very intense. We’re playing with fire; people die out there. It’s great to share our passion in a real way that’s not made up. Most mountaineering films are either eye candy—beautiful music, scenic national parks—or people fall off of a mountain and they die. That’s not happening here. It’s about that tension of living a life in society and yet trying to go do something as dangerous as this.

From what I understand the footage wasn’t initially shot with the intention of turning it into a film.
Jimmy: When we started shooting in 2008 we were not planning on making a feature-length film. As a filmmaker, there’s one sort of expedition that’s focused on the production, and there’s another kind of expedition that’s focused on the climbing objective. Meru is a climbing objective-focused trip, so we were just shooting for posterity. In 2011, we went back and shot quite a bit more mostly because of technology. We had better technology to tell our stories with.

Just in three years the tech made that huge leap?
Jimmy: Yeah. That’s when the DSLR revolution happened. It allowed us to have a much more cinematic quality, shooting with such small cameras and such nice lenses. The first moment I thought we might have a feature-length film was during one of the final scenes in the film. I thought it would make a good ending for a film, and that percolated more when you got back to the states.

Talk about constructing the film.
Chai: I only got involved with the film in 2012. I make documentary films, so it was actually quite liberating that they had already shot the mountain footage because I had no control over what was shot. The biggest challenge was structure. The film is about this extraordinary climb, but it’s about so much more. It was about creating emotional arcs in a way that would allow people who weren’t necessarily climbers to have access to the story and develop these themes of mentorship and friendship that are so important. It was a battle in the edit room, but it turned out well.

Tell me more about the master/pupil tradition in mountaineering.
Conrad: Everything we have today is a result of previous generations and what they’ve accomplished and the knowledge they’ve passed on. We’re a sum total of everything that’s come before us, and when you understand that and have someone who takes the best of their knowledge and makes you their understudy, it comes around. Where that introduction came to you, you then pass it on yourself. That was my relationship with Jimmy. It’s enriching for both parties.

Jimmy: I always knew what I wanted the film to say and what the key elements were because that’s what my experience was. I knew that the most powerful experiences I had revolved around this climb and meeting Conrad and having that mentorship. It’s the life I live. Friendship, trust, and partnership are all big parts of climbing. I wanted to make a climbing film that wasn’t a film about climbing. What interests me is everything around climbing.

You use a lot of terminology in the movie that frankly got lost on me because I’m not a climber. But it didn’t matter because, as you said, them movie’s not just about climbing. Were there any difficulties in explaining advanced climbing concepts to a larger audience?
Chai: Of course. I’m not a climber! I had no idea what anyone was talking about. There’s an authenticity to the climbing in the film, which was important to us, but we still explore emotional themes at the same time. The story of Meru is a story of mentorship. Conrad only found this climb through a very special mentorship, and he then shared it with Renan and Jimmy. The stories are so intertwined.

Is it kind of neat to have this amazing experience documented in a way that allows you to reflect and dissect it from a new perspective?
Conrad: I’ve seen the film seven times, and there’s always something new that appeals to me or helps me understand a little better.

There’s a nice little moment when you’re teaching your nephew how to climb, Jimmy. Do you like teaching people like that?
Jimmy: I like when people get excited about anything, really. I like when they show excitement toward an activity. It’s infections and it’s fun. Me and Chai have a daughter, Marina, and Chai says I’m not allowed to take her climbing.

Chai: She’s not going to watch the movie until she’s ready to fight for our country! [laughs] Or until she’s ready to drink.

Conrad: The best female rock climber right now is in the 8th grade.

How?!
Conrad: It’s like gymnastics. The best performers are at that age. There’s a weight to strength ratio. She’s climbing on really small, delicate holds. It’s bolt protected, so risk isn’t a part of it. Imagine climbing is a big tree. Each branch has a different aspect of it, but the commonality is gravity. What we’re doing is Himalayan big wall climbing, so there’s a lot of risk involved. But when it gets too difficult, we put a little nylon ladder down and we inch our way up. A free climber just uses the edges of the mountain. That’s what that girl, Ashima Shiraishi, is doing, climbing at that level of difficulty. So Marina could be right in there!

Chai: No way. [laughs]

I always thought I was too short to be doing stuff like that.
Jimmy: No, no. Ashima is way shorter than me and she climbs way harder than I ever will.

Conrad: Climbing is the most level playing field, gender-wise. The first person to free-climb The Nose at El Capitan was Lynn Hill.

Jimmy: She’s 5’2!

Conrad: I’m 6’2, and height is a disadvantage on certain kinds of climbs. Don’t let your perception fool you. Go to the rock climbing gym and give it a shot and you’ll be psyched. It’s way better than lifting weights because there’s that human aspect. You’re trusting me with your life and I’m trusting you with mine. That’s the beauty of the sport. We’re a team. The adversity is the cliff, the gravity, the weather, the mountain. It’s not three other human beings we have to climb against or keep a ball away from.

What’s the biggest misconception about climbing?
Jimmy: Probably what we just mentioned. The gender thing, that you have to have big muscles or be tall.

Conrad: That we’re thrill seekers and have a death wish. It’s not the case.

Jimmy: There is that misperception that we’re crazy, risk-taking people. Climbing is hyper calculated.

I think a common reaction people may have to this film is that they can’t imagine why you’d do this stuff. Some people may consider you a little crazy for putting your lives at risk like that.
Chai: I think there’s an argument to be made for that. It’s very sophisticated decision-making these guys are doing, but they are risking an awful lot.

Jimmy: The consequences are very real. A goal of ours was to give people a visceral experience of what it’s like to do a climb like that. We’re showing the audience why climbing a mountain is absolutely horrific and miserable and the last thing you’d want to do. But somewhere in the film, if there’s one moment where you might think, “I kind of get it. I see why they would do it.” Did you have a moment like that?

Yeah. It’s when Conrad is sitting by Renan’s bed after he’s badly injured. I understood then that the bond between them is so strong and beautiful that it’d make climbing a mountain worthwhile.
Chai: I love Conrad in that scene.

Right. I think the camaraderie you guys develop and share is something I envy. What have other people said when you ask them that question?
Jimmy: They say different things depending on their interpretation of my question. We kind of set it up for that moment after the portaledge breaks. We’re like, “You know what? We fixed the portaledge; let’s keep climbing.” There’s this montage of us tinkering away and doing our thing. There are moments when you have fun and you’re in awe of where you are. One of the original reasons I started climbing mountains was to be in beautiful places. You get to these incredible locations where you know no one else has been there before. It’s exciting.

What’s going through your head when you do have a second to just take a breath and take a mental picture?
Jimmy: That I should really savor this moment. I’ve been through enough trips where I know when it’s a powerful moment, and there aren’t very many like it.

Conrad: At that moment, you can’t take it in quick enough. It’s so amazing. To be in that location, high up on the peak, looking over everything…you feel like you’re on earth rather than being in a building in a city or something like that. It’s almost like you can feel the earth orbiting.

Jimmy: I’ve equated it to what I imagine it feels like to be in outer space. You feel overwhelmed.

Conrad: It’s an inhospitable environment. Humans aren’t meant to survive there. Unless we bring our tools and our food, we die.

Jimmy: You’re hyper-conscious that you’re in a completely ridiculous place for a human being to be. [laughs] Then there’s the idea where you’re in a space where you can actually enjoy it—there’s an absurdity to it.

Dave Carroll and Ryan Scafuro’s Bending Steel is a documentary character portrait of a man who (you guessed it) bends steel with his bare hands. Chris Schoek is a New York native training to become an Oldetime Strongman, the musclebound freaks of nature who wowed crowds at Coney Island for decades in the early 20th century before falling out of fashion. He’s not the biggest guy (he actually looks a little scrawny at first glance) and he’s incredibly uncomfortable in front of crowds, so his quest to revive the Strongman scene at Coney Island is quite the uphill battle. Dark, moving, inspirational and beautifully shot, Bending Steel is one of the best indie docs of the summer.

I spoke with Dave Carroll about his experience making the film and getting to know Chris, who he met serendipitously in his own NY apartment building. Bending Steel is available now on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Instant and at bendingsteelmovie.com

Tell me about how you met Chris. From what I understand, you guys share the same building.
Yeah. I was doing some laundry and heard a loud, metallic clang and some grunting. My French bulldog, who always accompanies me during laundry time, chased after the sound. I went after her, and Chris was down there. He wasn’t actually doing anything—I didn’t see any acts of bending steel—but he was just hanging out in his storage space, which is showcased in the film. The amount of bent steel warranted a lot of internal questions, which I didn’t ask at the time. But I asked him about two weeks later.

When I saw the title of the movie I had expectations of what it would be like. I was surprised to say the least.
Marketing is a huge part of filmmaking. [laughs] I really enjoy films that take you places you weren’t expecting to go. I think Bending Steel is like that. The film really isn’t about what the title [indicates]. It’s not so much about a strongman going out to Coney Island. It’s a personal story about Chris and everything that goes into that. I don’t necessarily subscribe to the mainstream marketing idea of a title telling audiences exactly what they’re getting into, and that may or may not have hurt us. It’s nice when people are shocked or surprised by what the film actually is. I think there are people out there who like going into a film not knowing much.

The film is a slow burn. It really doesn’t give you much at the beginning, but it just builds and builds layers until the end. I think it makes the payoff that much more worth it. Some people don’t like that. [laughs]

I don’t think the title is misleading in any way. After you watch the movie it takes on a new meaning as a metaphor.
Exactly. The idea of the two-inch bar and what it means is the point. We’ve spoken to a lot of people who’ve associated the bar with all kinds of things in their lives. It’s cool to have something people latch on to.

I think Chris’ journey to becoming a great steel-bender is great, and it’s clearly a focus of the movie, but his other journey of learning to be comfortable around people is even more fascinating to me.
I think a lot of what he struggles with is social interaction, finding something in the world to get really excited about and take you away from negativity. I’d be lying if I said that part of me doesn’t relate to what Chris is going through, in some way. Having taken this film on the road, I think audiences find that association as well.

Chris is a wonderful documentary subject. It came as a surprise to me when we learn that he doesn’t really have any friends. I think he’s very charming and intelligent.
He is charming and intelligent. I think he just sometimes doesn’t know what to do with himself in crowds of people. He’s more of a one-on-one guy. He’s a personal trainer by profession, and I think that lends itself to his personality. He engages the camera in a way that plays to his strengths. We spent over nine months with him where he was kind of using the camera and us as a way to engage with himself and look deeper into his own life.

In the movie, his strongman mentor is encouraging him to hold up the steel he bends like a trophy for the audience to show off what he’s done. But Chris is almost incapable of doing this. It’s fascinating psychologically. As he says, when he bends, the whole world melts away. When he’s done, he’s more happy for himself that he’s succeeded in bending the steel than he is concerned about the crowd’s happiness.
You’re absolutely right. When he performs, there’s this sense that he’s just doing this for himself. He’s just coming to terms with how to share this with people. When I met him, he wasn’t sharing it at all; he was doing it by himself. He got gratification out of it. What’s cool about the film is that you could never get that level of intimacy with Chris on-stage. When you’re aware of his story, seeing his stage performance is really special. It’s not just some guy bending steel; he’s overcoming these huge social issues. That last scene was a real joy to be a part of.

There are two empty seats at his final performance…
The element of his parents…[trails off]. It’s possible that people in your life who are physically close to you don’t really understand you. As the filmmakers, we were in between these worlds. On one side, his parents didn’t really understand what he was doing or how it helped his life. On the other side, Chris couldn’t articulate why what he was doing was important. It was like two ships passing in the night. It’s an interesting element of the film.

There’s this scene in the film where Chris and his parents have a tense conversation at their house. Chris leaves in a hurry and shuts the door. I was thinking, “The filmmakers are still in there!” How awkward to be left with his parents after an argument like that!
Documentaries are interesting in that way. Everyone just carried on like we weren’t there, which is the best thing you can hope for. There were definitely moments where we had to show ourselves out quietly, nod and thank them. [laughs]

Back in 1968, two of the most brilliant political minds in the country butted heads on a televised series of live debates, “unconventional coverage” of the Democratic and Republican presidential elections that saved ABC News from the TV ratings freefall it had been stuck in for months. The pundits were liberal leader Gore Vidal and the conservative party’s William F. Buckley, and their vicious, ungodly eloquent debates would go down as some of the best live television that’s ever aired.

Their hatred for one another and the explosive, damaging contention between them came to define the rest of their lives, however, as their war wounds from the debates would continue haunt them till their dying days. Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s documentary Best of Enemies presents the debates in an almost sports-doc fashion, profiling the verbal combatants and doing a sort of play-by-play of their bitter battle. It also delves into the damage it caused each of them in their private lives as well as exploring the bizarre parallels between their respective life journeys.

I spoke with Gordon in San Francisco about making the film and fashining their story in to a modern myth that highlights its relevancy to today’s political climate.

What’s made the Vidal/Buckley debates so enduring and captivating for so many years?
It’s verbal bloodsport. These are gladiators in the coliseum, fighting for their lives. Actually, what these guys are fighting for is the future of their country. They see that the other is dangerous to their country and that if the other is allowed to ascend, the country will go to ruins. It’s a superheroes’ battle. When I saw the raw debates for the first time, which is how I got into this, I couldn’t believe that the culture wars of the early 21st century were being expressed by two guys in the 20th century. 40-plus years ahead of their time, they were articulating the debates we’re having now.

And better than we do.
[laughs]

The footage is great, but I think what you guys do is accentuate the sense of urgency that runs through the debates. You up the intensity.
The urgency was there; our task was to maintain the urgency. In the raw footage, that urgency ebbs and flows, but even when it ebbs, it’s there. We started in 2010, but we didn’t really get to make it until 2014. We found out that lots of people didn’t know who they were. I don’t know how old you are, but had you heard of these guys?

I had, but I didn’t know a whole lot about them.
Many people just don’t know who they were. That gives us an opportunity to tell some of their biographies. Their biographies are strangely parallel, yet resulted in a diametric opposition. We tried to make every step a step of them coming closer to each other even as they got further apart. It was full of tension. The more we got into it over the years, the more there was to tell.

I’m a big fight fan. I watch a lot of UFC and boxing. There isn’t always animosity between the fighters, but when there is, there’s typically a point in the fight when they look each other in the eye and realize that they’re cut from the same cloth. They begin to respect each other, sometimes even relate to each other. Do you think Vidal and Buckley ever had a moment like that or did they always hate each other?
I think they always hated each other. I think Buckley had a moment where he realized Gore was his intellectual equal. Buckley came in with a sense of superiority, but there came a time when he had to accept that he couldn’t dismiss this guy in the way he intended to. Vidal understood that about Buckley going in, but it wasn’t a matter of respect. Buckley was capable of change. He was a guy who would later support the Iraq war, and then publicly change his mind. That was something I admired in him. He wasn’t afraid to build a coalition and then go against the coalition he built.

It’s almost eerie how parallel their lives are and how much they have in common aside from their political viewpoints. They almost begin to blend together as the story moves forward. It’s strange.
There’s something star-crossed about them. There’s an interesting way to look at this. Buckley and Norman Mailer were friends with opposing beliefs. But that’s nowhere near as interesting. There’s something in our nature that likes to gawk at the car crash, the fireworks. To make a leap here, I think that TV today has forsaken everything for the fireworks. With Vidal and Buckley, they were given fifteen uninterrupted minutes. No one today is given fifteen uninterrupted minutes. No one is given eight minutes to make their argument. These guys’ arguments grew and grew and grew, and the whole debate grew. You don’t get that anymore. You just get that Roman candle explosion. You don’t get the fuse. You don’t get the fire.

What was hard about fashioning the footage and research into a story?
Fitting it into 90 minutes. [laughs] We didn’t want a film that was too long.

Was 90 the goal?
80 was the goal. The movie’s 87. And I don’t think it’s fat. We cut out some really interesting stuff. Both Vidal and Buckley had early book publications that defined their careers: Gore’s The City and the Pillar and Bill’s God and Man at Yale. There were steps in their parallel lives, whole scenes that were cut.

Was it immediately clear which scenes to cut out or was there a debate?
There was some debate over the debates themselves. How much was enough? I saw the raw debates and loved every second of it. I believed strongly in the debates. At one point, the editors were putting music under the debates to maintain interest. I was like, no no no. We ended up in a compromised position. At some points, when a commentator’s about to come in, we begin the music. It’s a sort of easing of the segue, and I’m cool with that.

These two guys were intellectually superior individuals, good looking (one of them, at least) and incredibly successful in almost all of their career pursuits. But as the story unfolds and they get older, you begin to realize that they were both weirdos in a way, at least in society. They’re isolated in their genius.
They both were conquerors rising to the top. They both had very active social lives and thrived on that, but at the same time, you had this cantankerous Gore who always wanted to be alone. It’s just the way people choose to live their lives, I guess.

I almost lost it watching that clip of Buckley on Charlie Rose talking about death.
Good. That makes me feel good. It’s really powerful. If you watched that clip raw, you wouldn’t feel that. But since you’ve had time for these things to develop, seeing that clip can be full of meaning. All of those moments peak in that clip.

The piece of footage of the final debate where Buckley says that regrettable thing—I thought that was going to be the big, climactic moment of the movie. I thought there’d be a little more story after that, but that was the big “moment,” if you will. So the Charlie Rose clip took me totally off guard.
Vidal purposely misquoted Socrates. Socrates said,  “The unexamined life was not worth living.” Vidal said, “The untelevised life is not worth living.” There were mountains of archival material for us to go through. I’m sure we missed diamonds, but we also found a lot of gems.

Of the two of them, who would you be more frightened of interviewing, like we’re doing here and now.
Totally Vidal. And we did it with Vidal. He died in 2012, and in late 2010 we arranged to interview him in LA. He was in decline and in a lot of physical pain. He was paranoid and generally unhappy. So we march in there and set up our interview with great trepidation. I felt like he was a man who would take great pleasure in exposing my ignorance and chewing me up coarsely and spitting me out. He’s in a wheelchair and he’s wheeled into the interview room. He’s not looking at anybody and he’s not talking. It’s very clear that he’s just withdrawn. A guy on the crew says, “My grandfather served on the Aleutian islands in World War II when you were there. He said he could never get warm.” Gore raises his eyes, shoots darts and says, “I had my rage to keep me warm.”

Trevor Juras’ debut feature The Interior follows James (Patrick McFadden), a man who abruptly quits his well-paying job to go live as a hermit in a forest on the other side of the country. It’s a slow burn of a horror film, but as I said in my review Juras’ unique approach makes The Interior one of the more interesting horror debuts in recent memory. With a lengthy prelude, frequent tonal shifts, excellent cinematography and some truly intense scenes in the film’s latter half, Juras quickly establishes himself as a young filmmaker to keep an eye on.

On the day of The Interior‘s world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia Festival, I spoke with Juras about The Interior and his earlier short film The Lamp (which you can watch here). The Interior is currently seeking distribution.

How did The Interior come about?
I wanted to do a lost in the woods film for a long time, probably dating all the way back to when I first saw The Blair Witch Project. My first real serious stab at it was a few years ago when I wrote a script about a man and a woman in the woods, and it was kind of cliché. It was less of a horror film and more of a relationship film with some horror elements. That didn’t really appeal to me, so I shelved it for a while. Then I thought, “What if I tried to do something that’s just one person?” And that’s how it started.

When you were starting The Interior did you know from the beginning it was going to be a horror film?
The initial idea was to be as pure of a horror film as possible. It didn’t really turn out that way. The first 25 minutes are very different from the latter two-thirds of the film. That was a bit more of a conscious decision because so many horror films have 20, 30, 40 minutes of exposition before you get to what you’re there for. And I thought that if I’m going to have that kind of thing, then I want it to be as different, entertaining and funny as possible before I really shift gears to more of a traditional kind of horror feel.

Did you find it challenging to write about one character in solitude?
It was easier because I didn’t have to write a whole bunch of dialog. When two people are in the woods it’s probably non-stop talking and lots of conflict. With this, I was just trying to put myself in the situation, which was not too hard to do. I stayed in a log cabin for 10 days about a year ago and I’ve gone camping by myself, I have some experience being alone out in the middle of nowhere, so I just drew from that.

Both The Interior and The Lamp are disarming films in some ways since they can quickly turn into different films altogether. Are you drawn to making your films unpredictable like that?
Definitely. I don’t know how much of a conscious decision it is, but I love films where I don’t know what’s coming. Whether it’s a stylistic shift, a plot shift or a dramatic character shift, I just love not knowing what’s coming next. I kind of instinctively write from that angle.

Some sequences in The Interior reminded me of silent films.
That’s an interesting observation because I think it comes more from the lead [Patrick McFadden]. He seems like in a past life he was a silent film star. I worked with him on a couple short films, and I was aware of what his strengths are, and one of those strengths is his ability to emote very authentically without being over the top. You can really see what’s going on. He’s got a lot of drama naturally in his face, and he’s great at a kind of silent movie acting. I think a lot of it comes from him. I definitely tailored the part for him, it sort of organically came out that way.

I noticed that you had a couple of cast and crew members from The Lamp and your other shorts involved with The Interior as well. Would you say you work with a close-knit group?
It kind of turned into one. Shaina Silver-Baird, the actress from The Lamp, is in The Interior as well, along with Andrew Hayes who plays the boss. He was actually my colleague and then my actual boss. I had a day job in the casting world for a long time, and Shaina is someone I auditioned. I like working with people again because I can write a part with people specifically in mind. I didn’t do any auditioning for The Interior at all. I just assigned parts and didn’t even rehearse, they just showed up. I knew they could do it because I know them really well, and I was able to write something for them specifically, which is really fun for me.

Was it an easy shoot then?
It seemed like a pretty easy shoot. It was fast and furious, so all the stress came from how fast we had to shoot. We shot for ten days in British Columbia first, and then we shot three days in Toronto for the opening 25 minutes of the film. The three days in Toronto were pretty hectic because it’s a lot of stuff to cover in three days. We were running from location to location, sometimes three locations in one day. I’m pretty economical. I like working fast, I like having a little bit of pressure, but not to the point where I’m pulling my hair out. It really worked out, just being able to whip these shots off fast. I like just a couple takes. I don’t like to linger too long.

The cinematography is great, especially the way you shoot the forest at nighttime. How did you and the cinematographer come up with the look of the film?
Well, step one was the location. We shot on an island called Saltspring Island, which is part of a chain of islands between the mainland and Vancouver Island. I had gone there a year earlier on vacation and really fell in love with the look. It doesn’t even look real, it looks like something out of a fantasy film. And then for the nighttime shots, [cinematographer] Othello Ubalde and I were really adamant about it not looking lit. We wanted it to look as real as possible. We did have a battery-powered light out there, but we only used it for the dream sequence that happens later in the film. Other than that it’s just a high-powered flashlight. We were careful about where we were pointing it and where we had the camera sitting to sort of maximize the spread of the beam, but that’s all. We wanted to keep it really, really dark and really quiet and make it look as natural as possible. To me, that is the scariest thing. When you see a film that takes place in the woods and you can see other lights, it can look really beautiful, but it definitely doesn’t have that authentic [feeling], and that’s what we were going for.

It must be challenging in some way to make a film about someone’s largely internal conflicts. How were you able to communicate that information to viewers?
I think by virtue of it being only about one character who’s out there alone. That’s sort of the only way to go with it because he doesn’t have anyone to bounce his feelings off of or anything like that. That was probably the biggest challenge. A lot of that came together in the editing room. We shot, shot, shot, and then I had an idea of what the film was gonna be, but when I sat down in the editing room I really understood what I had and what I was doing. I find that happens a lot to me with my short films. I think I’m making one thing, and then it turns out to be something else, and almost always for the better.

You use a lot of classical music for the score.
It’s a personal preference. I love classical music. I almost think of what I do as very elaborate music videos. Often the music comes before the scene. The scene in Toronto where James sabotages his own career, [the music] came first. When I was listening to it I thought of the whole scenario, and surprisingly it came out exactly how I pictured it. I love using classical music and a big part of that is, well, it’s public domain. I have a friend who’s a world-class pianist, so he had some recordings that I used and we did a few recordings for the movie. Public domain music is some of the best music of all-time. It’s stood the test of time, and there’s so much complexity, drama and intellect in the music that I find it does a lot of heavy lifting. You throw on a piece of music like that, and you want to do justice to the music. It’s sort of the music that was in my head as I was conceiving the film.

Are you working on anything new?
Well we just finished the film over a week ago…

Really?
Yeah [Laughs]. I don’t remember the exact quote but the last 10% was like 80% of it. We did so much so quickly, and the last little bit was just agonizingly slow, just little tiny pieces that we had to get in place. I have started writing something new. I have three competing ideas, and one I like the most would be more similar to the first 25 minutes of The Interior, similar in that kind of tone. Definitely a character-driven piece. I have an idea, but as I finish writing it, it’ll probably be very different.

Do you want to avoid making something with genre elements for your next project?
We’ll see what happens. I do like genre films, but I love directors like Lars Von Trier and Paul Thomas Anderson and The Coen Brothers. I really love South Korean cinema. With The Lamp, I was surprised that it played genre festivals. I didn’t expect that, I thought it was more of a drama piece. I didn’t think a festival like Toronto After Dark would be interested. I submitted it on the advice of a friend and it got accepted, but the idea that I’m working on right now doesn’t have as much of a genre feel on it. There is horror, but it’s kind of a real world horror. A society gone wrong kind of horror as opposed to a horror movie.

Kyle Alvarez’s The Stanford Prison Experiment depicts the controversial study that saw 24 male college students assigned roles of prisoner or guard in a mock prison environment. Overseen by Dr. Philip Zimbardo, the experiment was shut down after only six days, as the students began falling into their roles to a disturbing, unhealthy degree. Despite its divisive ethical implications, Zimbardo’s findings went on to greatly impact the field of psychology, specifically guiding the conversation of how good people can be influenced to do bad things in certain environments.

Avarez’s film is chilling in its unadorned depiction of the events that took place in the basement of Stanford University. It boasts cast of rising young actors including Tye Sheridan, Michael Angarano Olivia Thrilby and Ezra Miller, along with screen vets Billy Crudup and Nelson Ellis.

In San Francisco, I spoke with Alvarez and Dr. Zimbardo, who was the primary consultant on the film. The Stanford Prison Experiment is in theaters now.

What’s the biggest misconception about the experiment?
Alvarez: I think people are misled when people speak about whether it was ethical or not. They confuse the issue of ethics versus the value of the experiment. In making a film, part of you is inherently endorsing it. You’re saying, “This is worth looking at.” The critics dismiss the conversation around the experiment because they get lost in the question of ethics. That’s not to say the question of ethics isn’t important; it’s just a different conversation as far as I’m concerned. Obviously, this set in motion a lot of review board changes about why an experiment like this could never happen again. But that doesn’t say that we shouldn’t still be talking about it. That’s where I actually get kind of upset now that I understand the experiment on a deeper level. Don’t say we can’t have a conversation about this because you wouldn’t be able to stage the experiment today. That’s the misconception: to discuss the Stanford Prison Experiment is to discuss it as ethical or non-ethical. That’s a much lesser conversation to be had about it.

Zimbardo: To me, one misconception is that the study proves that everybody is evil. Lots of people say that. I think there was a New York Times piece that says, “Zimbardo Believes Everyone Is Evil.” No. I believe everyone is capable of evil. I believe, actually, that people are born good and can be corrupted by being put in certain situations. That’s a very different thing. We picked people who are good on every dimension we could figure, and we put them in a bad place and the bad place dominated them. We brought out the evil within, and we were able to switch their ordinary, good, wholesome orientation into a cynical, pessimistic, negative one if they were guards, and a helpless one if they were prisoners.

The experiment was of course a pivotal moment for the field of psychology. Talk about the importance of representing its events accurately.
Alvarez: It was a huge part of the initial inception of this iteration of the film. People have been trying to make it for ten years. Phil came onboard and worked closely with a screenwriter, Tim Talbott. Tim was the first one of the many screenwriters who tackled this project to say, “What happened here is enough for a movie.” To me, that was the defining thing for me. That’s not a criticism of Das Experiment, which is a form of entertainment in itself. But in terms of that movie being a representation of the Stanford Prison Experiment, what’s unfortunate is that it’s only cinematic in that it ends with someone killing someone else. That the message is only clear if we take it that far.

I fundamentally disagree with that. We talk about representing specifics of the experiment, but how about the broader things? I made sure that we hired kids to play the roles. These weren’t 35-year-olds playing teenagers. We have a 17-year-old on the cast. Part of the power and effectiveness of the story is their vulnerability and how impressionable they are. In other versions, they’re adults. They have backstories and you learn about their girlfriends and wives. You lose a universal quality to it.

I think there’s actually a stakes problem happening in filmmaking in general. It’s happening with our blockbusters especially. It used to just be, “Peter Parker has to save Mary Jane.” Then, it’s “Peter Parker needs to save New York.” Then, it’s “Peter Parker needs to save the world.” Then, “Peter Parker needs to save the universe.” It’s this thing where you engage less and less. I’m interested in how you make the audience engaged in something where the stakes are [more intimate]. Devin Faraci wrote a great piece about why Inside Out was so important because the stakes were mental well-being of an 8-year-old girl. There’s not a drop of blood in my film. No one dies in the end. How do you make that intense without the things we normally rely on? That was the challenge that was really exciting.

I was incredibly riled up after watching the movie. I was with a friend and I felt bad because I was not fun to be around after the movie.
Alvarez: You’ve got to give that to the actors. They really, really threw themselves into it. Chris [Sheffield] doing the push-ups, Michael [Angarano] being so committed to that guard and understanding how it would go from fun to disturbing to evil. The amount of work they put in to creating that mood was a big part of it.

Dr. Zimbardo, I think one of the keys to the film is the progression of your mental state, as portrayed by Billy Crudup.
Zimbardo: Billy does a beautiful job of being me. There are several points of key transformation where I become the prison superintendent and not the researcher. One of the points is when the parents come to complain about how bad their son looks when they visit him. I never say, “I’m sorry.” Instead, I flip it around and say, “What’s wrong with your son? Does he have insomnia?” Essentially, I turn it to say, “There’s nothing wrong with my situation; there’s something wrong with your kid.” The mom says, “He told me you wake them up at all hours of the night,” which was true. I say, “Well of course, lady. This is a prison. Guards have to account for everybody to make sure no one’s escaped.” She says, “I don’t mean to make trouble,” and that’s a red light. If she says it, she’s going to do it. And she’s right; her kid broke down.

I turn to the husband and say, “Don’t you think your kid is tough enough to take it? That’s a sexist thing. I know exactly what he’s going to say. “My son’s a leader,” blah blah. I shake his hand, eliminating the wife. She’s not going to make trouble now. As soon as her husband starts talking, she shuts up. A woman would never talk over her husband back then. It’s not until I looked at the video of that exchange afterwords when I thought, “Oh my god. You’re the thing you hate.” I work hard never to be a sexist, and here I am, saying these things. That was one of the first times I remember being aware of myself moving towards being a prison superintendent.

Talk about how your findings, specifically within the prisoner group, can be used to benefit other, larger groups of oppression, like the black community or the gay community.
Alvarez: The gay community is starting to achieve equality via exposure. A huge part of the misconception of the gay community is how it’s being portrayed. Suddenly, you start portraying gay people with families and things like this, and that’s where the media portrayal plays a big part. Me being more of a pacifist, I’ve always appreciated people being more aggressive. It’s Martin Luther King Jr. versus Malcolm X. Sometimes I find the gay community isn’t angry enough. Prop 8 took too long. When you look at the Stanford Prison Experiment and the revolting prisoners, specifically Ezra Miller’s character, it takes Nelson Ellis’ character to say, “He was just a part of the system. By revolting, he wasn’t revolutionizing the system; he was allowing the system to grow more powerful.”

Zimbardo: The consultant, Carlo Prescott—who’s maybe the most articulate person I know—he didn’t finish high school. I was teaching a Psychology in Prison course at Stanford and I brought him on as co-instructor. I got him a business card. Suddenly, he’s all the things he never was. He comes into the experiment thinking he’s the only black guy, and here’s this other black guy, a graduate student who’s much younger than him and very talented. Clearly, Carlo went, “That could have been me.” There was instant resentment. “You got all the breaks. I was in prison while you went to school.” There’s a little bit of that in the movie.

Alvarez: The scope of what happened was so hard to capture. So much happened in six days. Some of the most painful stuff on a writing and directing level was, “What do we lose? What do we cut?” The challenge of making a film in 25 weeks is that each moment needs to really count. Gaius Charles was so studious. He had notes for himself on scenes he wasn’t even in. It was great to work with Nelson Ellis as well. Olivia Thrilby only worked on the movie for three days. It’s almost embarrassing to work with such great talents.

The movie put me in the headspace of those boys, which was difficult, although that’s definitely a good thing. What I found most interesting was how unadorned the story was, cinematically.
Alvarez: Sometimes people want more of the director’s influence or more of a moral center, but in this case I was just interested in taking that kind of voice out of it and letting the events speak for themselves. So then you say, “Where am I the director on this?” With this film, it was really shot selection. Me and the DP said, the movie’s going to start of where you’re really aware of the geography of this space. You’re always going to see these two walls and everything is going to feel cramped in. This group of people fills the frame. Then, as the movie goes on, the individual people fill the frame. The claustrophobia changes. Reading the exit interviews from the experiment, a lot of the guys felt like it was a real prison. But it was just a back hallway of a building; they were grad student offices. My goal was to have the audience forget how small of a space it was. It’s very rigid early on, but then I deliberately didn’t care if the camera went out of focus near the end. Sometimes it’d go out of focus for five, six seconds.

There’s that shot where Michael is walking away from the camera.
Alvarez: That was not planned, but I saw it in the edit and I was like, that looks so good! I’ve done that twice in movies, where something goes out of focus in a “wrong” way, and it comes directly from The Graduate, where [Katharine Ross] realizes he’s been sleeping with her mother, and she turns back to him, and she’s totally out of focus for a good one-and-a-half seconds before we see her face. When you see it, it’s the director saying, “this is a film, and someone’s pulling a knob.” But because it’s so motivated by the experience the character is going through, it works.

Speaking of Billy Crudup, there’s a great deleted scene where he and Patrick Fugit have a conversation about how they love the mess-ups on a Marvin Gaye record. Marvin does a “Woo!” or “Ow!” on the song, and it’s their favorite part of the song. Sometimes the errors or roughness can be the texture of the movie as much as the clean cuts.

Zimbardo: I couldn’t be more happy with the movie. I can remember sitting at Sundance and saying, “Finally! The wait was worth it!” The acting is brilliant. The directing, the editing. Even the sound. Billy does a great job of being me, and Olivia Thrilby, although she has a small part, really has the charm my wife does.

Alvarez: If I had more time, that would be the character I would give more definition. But if the character’s only going to have three scenes in the movie, you need someone like Olivia to carry it.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the collaboration between Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss is one of the best things cinema has going for itself right now. Since 2003, Petzold and Hoss have worked together on six films, and over time the two have established themselves as a dramatic force to be reckoned with. It wasn’t until recently that their work became more popular with Barbara, a dramatic masterwork by Petzold about a woman trying to escape Eastern Germany. Both Petzold and Hoss, along with Barbara co-star Ronald Zehrfeld, return this year with Phoenix, their latest film.

The film could be easily described as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo transplanted to post-WWII Germany, although that only gives away some of the story. Hoss plays Nelly, a Holocaust survivor who had her face disfigured during her time at a concentration camp. Her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) finds her after the War, and with the help of a plastic surgeon gives Nelly the opportunity to go under facial reconstruction surgery. Lene and the doctors suggest Nelly should get an entirely new face, but she refuses. She wants to look exactly like she did before the War.

The struggle between clinging on to the past and letting go is Phoenix’s major theme, and Petzold finds one hell of a psychologically twisted way to explore it. Once Nelly recovers from her surgery, she hunts down her husband Johnny (Zehrfeld), hoping to reconnect with him. Johnny, thinking that Nelly is dead, doesn’t recognize his wife at first, but he sees a resemblance. He gets an idea to use Nelly as a lookalike, passing her off as his wife so he can claim her family’s large inheritance. Nelly agrees to go along with the plan, and we watch Johnny give his wife directions on how to play herself (or, more accurately, his idea of who she is). It’s a traumatizing situation for Nelly, but she continues to go along with it, hoping it will lead her back to the way things were.

Hoss, giving one of the year’s best performances so far, delves straight into her character’s complexities with ease, and Petzold’s direction is the definition of pure class. And while Phoenix may be more of a slow burn compared to Barbara, the film’s ending, where Nelly finally rises from the ashes, delivers the kind of stunning wallop that continues to prove why Hoss and Petzold are an unstoppable pair.

We had a chance to sit down and talk with Christian Petzold just after the film’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. Read on for the full interview, where Petzold talks about his longtime collaboration with late filmmaker Harun Farocki, his interest in portraying people as ghosts, what makes his collaboration with Nina Hoss so strong, and why he prefers to work with film over digital.

Phoenix releases theatrically July 24th.

Could you go into the genesis of Phoenix? How did you and co-writer Harun Farocki discover Nelly’s story?
At the end of the 1970s, I was living in a little suburb and the revolution failed. My personal revolution failed. There was a very important magazine at this time called Filmkritik, and there was an issue by Harun Farocki on Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In this issue there was an essay about the theme of men who create women, like Pygmalion or Frankenstein’s bride. And in this essay, he is writing about a book called “Return from the Ashes” by Hubert Monteilhet. 5 years later, when I was a member of a football team in Berlin, I met Harun, who was also a football player. This is when we started our collaboration, and we thought about how we can realize the plot of “Return from the Ashes” in Germany. We think we can do it, and we can make this connection between Auschwitz and Hitchcock. And we’re always interested in the theme of [people as] ghosts. People who have lost their work or who are unemployed are ghosts. After we made Barbara, Harun said to me [about Nina Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld] that we have a couple strong enough to play the protagonists of this story.

With Phoenix and Barbara, you’ve made two films back to back about some of the darkest moments in Germany’s past. What drew you focusing on these time periods?
12 years ago, I said to myself that I can’t stand stories anymore where there are big problems in the world, but love solves problems. I am interested in complex situations where love is complicated, and it’s a mirror of the situation. I said I wanted to make 3 or 4 films about love in oppressive situations. Barbara was one of them, Phoenix is the second one, and the third one will be made in 2 years. It’s in Marseilles in 1940, and it’s about refugees waiting to go to the US.

You’re putting a heavy emphasis on identity in the film, along with the theme of rebirth versus re-creation. What interested you in focusing on these ideas?
The word “person” comes from the Greek word “persona,” and it means mask. You have to have a mask to be a person, to have an identity, to be a part of society. When you lose your persona, your mask, you’re nothing. And in Nelly’s case, she has also lost her body. But what she didn’t lose is her memory, and this little bubble of memories was like a survival kit during her time at the camps. She wants to get her body back, she wants to get her identity back, and she wants to materialize herself. She doesn’t want to be a ghost anymore. This is the main energy of the film.

I was noticing the performance aspect of the film. Nelly is knowingly going along with something she knows is false, and is letting Johnny direct her. For me, it was interesting to see her slowly come to realize that she’s really putting herself in a fiction.
Right. There’s one thing I remember now. There is an autobiography by a political essayist in Germany. It was 1933, and he was a studying to be a lawyer. He’s sitting in a court 2 days before the Nazis have won the election. He’s reading something where someone has betrayed another person. Then he heard shouting and crying in the whole building because the [Nazi soldiers] are coming into the courts in this building in Berlin. They take all the Jews out and start beating them. He’s sitting there, and he’s German, not a Jew, and he’s hearing all these cries and shouts. He says to himself that he’s in a tunnel, and he doesn’t want to hear this. Then the door opens, and three [Nazis] come in with sticks shouting at him “Are you Jew or are you German?” He said that he is German. The man said that, in this moment, he betrayed human beings. This was very important for Nina during rehearsals, because she says “This is not my mask. This is not my identity. I am not a Jew.”

This is your sixth film with Nina Hoss. What is like for the two of you to work together after all this time? Is it a foregone conclusion for you that, when you make another film, she will be in it?
Not all movies, but for the next one or two films. For the last six movies, I always knew she would play the main character. And from this moment on she’s a collaborator. This is totally different from other actors I’ve worked with. She will take all the material I give her: all the movies, photos, comics, ideas, and the script, and she puts it in a suitcase, goes out to smoke and never comes back until we start shooting. And when she comes back for shooting, she makes something with the material that is not what I wanted from her. She’s working a little bit against me. She’s working for herself, and this is a very good collaboration, because on the other side of the camera there’s someone who is not my projection.

You shot this on 35mm?
Yes.

Do you want to keep working on film?
In the last 2 or 3 years, my friends have changed their minds. They say digital is great. For me, Kodak 35mm is the best material for human skin and nature. We lost something with digital. We want to re-create it with digital things, and for me I need one analog step in the procedure because it starts living. I’m really sure that this will be my last film on 35mm, because we don’t find material. Everyone says digital is less expensive, but it’s more expensive. The film camera is not expensive. 100 years of people’s inventions are in this material. The editing suites are cheap, and there’s no big post production because the negatives are fantastic. I’m really sad about digital. And another thing is that there are monitors all over the set, and everybody is looking in the monitor. So you start directing on the monitor, and when you direct on the monitor you stop talking to the actors. You talk to the monitors. I don’t like this kind of filmmaking, but I have to do it.