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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The things I do for this job. In order to interview actor Hayley Kiyoko about her role in Insidious: Chapter 3, I had to walk through the “Into the Further 4D Experience,” a jump-scare haunted house on wheels that incorporates Oculus Rift VR technology to make ramp up the scare factor to pants-wetting levels. It was so super spooky it made me behave quite strangely (at one point a guy in a costume grabbed me from behind, and I tried to hug him; he declined, understandably), but it was all worth it once I sat down with the charming Miss Kiyoko at a grilled cheese spot just across the street (ahhh…melted cheesy goodness).

Insidious: Chapter 3 is an origin story that takes place before the events surrounding the Lambert family. It follows psychic Elise Rainier as she uses her abilities to aid a young girl named Quinn Brenner (Stefanie Scott), who’s got an evil entity breathing down her neck. Kiyoko plays Brenner’s friend and confidante, Maggie. The film opens wide today.

Tell me about your character in Insidious: Chapter 3.

I play Maggie, Quinn Brenner’s best friend. She’s the positive support system for her. There’s a tension in the film where you question why she’s so normal, and then something bad happens.

Do you find as an actor that you have to have something in common with your character for it to work?
If you can’t find something you have in common with your character, you utilize your differences to find something in common. The fact that you’re so different makes you almost relate to it because you’re so polar opposite. It’s hard to explain. I also use people from high school [as inspiration]. Mean, shallow girls. But you also have to humanize every character you play. Whether they’re a good or bad person, there’s always this underlying issue that they’re going through which you can relate to. The character can be this crazy monster, but whatever their issue is, it’s going to be very human. You can relate one way or another.

That makes sense. I wasn’t a bully in high school, and I assume you weren’t either, but I’m pretty sure we can use past experiences to understand how bullies behave. We know bullies.
I know a ton of them. And look where they are now! [laughs] When you’re young, your parents go, “Don’t worry, they don’t matter,” but you don’t listen. Then, you’re 23 and you’re going on Facebook and you see all the popular girls that were at one time the shit, and they’re pregnant or divorced or whatever. I root for the underdogs, and I root for my fans to try to learn what I didn’t learn until now: high school doesn’t matter. You have to stick to yourself and the people who are nice to you. The world is so much better and bigger than school.

I listened to your music a bit and thought it was pretty cool. Talk to me about that side of your career.
I released This Side of Paradise back in February and I’m going back on tour soon. I have a music video coming out too, and Stefanie Scott from Insidious: Chapter 3 is going to play the lead in my music video. That’ll be out at the end of June, so check it out.

It’s pretty cool that you’ve got these two careers going on at the same time and you can use resources from one to support the other.
I’m cross-promoting them, totally. I love doing both. My dream life is doing world tours and shooting movies during my breaks.

Seems like you’re pretty much right there!
Well, not yet. [laughs] I’ve still got to do my world tours and play amphitheaters.

It seems like horror movies are being taken more seriously nowadays as legitimate works of art. It used to be sort of a fanboy, B genre, but now these movies are a viable place for A-list actors to do some good work.
I think there’s a difference in the style of horror films. Insidious 3 is more of a drama and a thriller than anything, you know? There’s a good story to it. It’s not just sitting in a chair and getting scared for an hour and a half. I think that’s why people are respecting horror films more and why they’ve been so successful lately. They really connect with a wide audience.

Are you a horror fan?
I don’t seek out horror films because I get scared way too easily, but I’m definitely a fan of the Insidious franchise.

It’s been a very successful franchise. What do you think makes it special?
You care about the characters. A lot of the fans are obsessed with Lin Shaye, the “godmother of horror.” Some horror films have all these random people in it, and you watch it, and it’s cool, but then you forget about the whole thing. People are invested in Lin’s character and what she’s going through, so you want to go back for more.

This is a prequel, correct?
Yeah. It’s an origin story.

I feel like some horror franchises end up going on too long. Is there a danger that Insidious could run too long?
I don’t think there’s a danger if you’re making money and the people want more. It’s about them and what they want. As long as they’re happy, that’s what’s important. Fast and Furious is going really long…

And it’s going strong.
Right. We’ll see how long it goes. Maybe Insidious 8 will be the best one yet. [laughs]

You say you get frightened easily. Do you get scared on the set of a movie like this?
Yeah. It’s scary to walk into the further. The further is so scary. The red elevator door is the worst.

Did you have a good enough time making this movie that you’d be interested in doing more horror?
I would definitely be open to it. I want to do action films most. I like being physical. I’d love to learn how to shoot a gun, ride horses, throw karate chops. Maybe in a cool country. I’d like to be in a big blockbuster. I’ve done martial arts since I was five, so it’d be nice to utilize that down the line.

What do you look for when you read a script?
A challenge. There are a lot of things I haven’t tackled. I’ve only just begun, so there’s a long list of challenges I haven’t faced yet.

The cast in this movie must have been great to be around for a budding actor like yourself.
They’re so cool. Dermot (Mulroney) is the nicest guy ever and Stefanie is super cool. It’s been fun doing all the press stuff together.

Dermot seems like a really down-to-earth kind of guy.
He’s really chill. I love when you meet people and you think they’re going to be nice, and they are.

Have you had it happen the other way, where they’re not so nice?
Yeah. I think we’re all so scared to meet our idols because we don’t know what to expect. It’s always great to find out that they’re cool.

I interview people a lot, and sometimes you leave and you go, “Man, he was kind of a dick.” It’s really disappointing.
Yeah. Then you think, “Maybe I shouldn’t have met them.” [laughs]

You have a lot of young fans. Do you go out of your way to be really nice to them?
Oh yeah, I love my fans. I really try to instill confidence in them. They’re so supportive, and they’re unique people. I could have had really freaky fans, [laughs] but luckily they’re cool to hang out with and really loving and kind.

People who do what you do are forced into the position of role model. Some aren’t comfortable with that role, but you seem very at ease with it.
I think it’s important to put positive things out there. For people who follow me, it’d be shitty if I was a bad person. I enjoy it. It’s cool doing concerts and meeting fans there. A lot of fans feel that you don’t read their tweets, but I see everything. There are a top 20 fans that I feel I’m really close with. When I finally meet them, I’m going to give them the biggest hug because they’re so supportive. I really do care about them.

I like your song “Girls Like Girls.”
That’s the video Stefanie’s playing the lead in. It’s going to be a really powerful, emotional story. I think it’s a great positive message to put out there. I don’t feel like there’s another song that sends that message quite like that, so I’m really excited to put that video out.

What can your fans expect from Insidious: Chapter 3?
Well, it’s really scary! So, if you’re going, you’d better be ready! Don’t go see the movie alone. Stay with your friends.

A mass of humanity falls through the air thousands of feet above the ground. They latch onto each others’ hands and arms, together maneuvering in the sky taking the shape of a giant snowflake. This mesmerizing image, from Marah Strauch’s radiant documentary Sunshine Superman, encapsulates what the film is all about. The film is about skydiving and BASE jumping, yes, but it’s truly about the tight human bond between filmmaker and late pioneer of BASE jumping, Carl Boenish, and his wife, Jean. It’s a sort of documentary romance movie that works two-fold as a thrilling extreme-sports profile.

I spoke to Strauch about what it was like to get to know a deceased man through archival footage over the course of eight years, as well as her experience making a film in today’s indie landscape. Sunshine Superman opens tomorrow, June 5th, in Toronto.

Carl considered himself a filmmaker first. How would you describe his filmmaking style?

He was really interested in capturing the joy of BASE jumping and skydiving. He was an innovator in aerial cinematography. He was strapping cameras to places nobody would have thought to put a camera. I think his style was very simple and direct, and I mean that in a good way. There’s an innocence and playfulness to the way he made films that I think is really charming. There’s a great reenactment in the film that a lot of people think I did, but actually he did it. They were escaping from a building, running down the street.

I think the reenactments you did make were integrated very smoothly. Were you trying to mimic his visual style when you made them?
I didn’t want to create big, theatrical reenactments. I wanted them to feel very personal and not aggrandizing. I wanted them to be really simple and direct, so in that way, I guess I was [echoing his style].

The movie’s not about extreme sports so much as it is about the human bond between Carl and Jean. Was that your vision from the beginning?
The footage is beautiful, but I think the human love story between Carl and Jean became really interesting to me when I met Jean Boenish. I started to really understand their love story. I describe the movie as a love story with BASE jumping as a backdrop. That’s how I always thought of it. I definitely think it’s more about people than BASE jumping.

Carl talks about the spirituality of BASE jumping and sky diving for him. Is filmmaking spiritual for you?
Huh. I’ve never thought about that. I’m not a terribly spiritual person, which is kind of odd because I just made this film. For me, filmmaking is an obsessive activity. I think of it as something that’s very physical and something you don’t take lightly. It’s something that’s a very passionate activity, and whether that’s spiritual or not, I don’t know. 16mm film is something that’s so transcendent to me, almost like it’s spiritual. [laughs] I’m not sure why that is, but having that 16mm film makes for a special experience. I guess it’s nostalgia. Part of what’s great about filmmaking is being around all these people who are doing things that are so interesting. It really puts you in a different place. I don’t know if it’s spiritual, but it’s definitely a journey.

What was it like seeing the movie on a big screen for the first time?
During post production you’re watching it and paying attention to every little thing that’s wrong. [laughs] You’re just like, “Oh my god, my film sucks!” We premiered in Toronto almost a year ago, and it was an amazing experience to watch it with an audience. I think it’s a really theatrical film, and I hope people see it in the theater. It’s a big-scale experience and a very physical experience. I liked watching the audience’s reactions. It was everything I wanted it to be.

It’s a foreign thing to most people, the idea of getting to know someone who’s not with us anymore over the course of eight years. What was that like?
It was a challenge. It’s like being a detective. I think the challenge was making a film about a dead person that was a theatrical, fully immersive experience. We were trying to show a full character portrait of Carl, and looking at it in retrospect, it was an odd idea to do that. But it was clear that he was the central character of the film. As much as possible I would have him narrate and tell stories. He left a lot of audio of himself. A lot of it is on cassette tapes, so we have this film coming out across the country where a lot of the audio is from cassette tapes! The film’s held together a bit with rubber bands and glue. People compare the film to Man On Wire, saying Carl’s not Phillippe Petit, but he’s no longer with us. It’s a different thing. All of the audio is archival. Cassette tapes. [laughs]

Was there a point in the process of making this film where you felt down and weren’t sure this would all come together?
Oh man, I think that still happens! [laughs] Filmmaking is really hard, particularly you first feature. There are a lot of things people don’t tell you about that process. All the parts that have to do with money are the hardest parts. Financing, distribution. Those parts are the least enjoyable. The actual making of the film is a wonderful thing. I hope filmmakers get to do more of that. The other stuff is discouraging, but all you can do as a filmmaker is make the best film you possibly can. Everything else is pretty much out of your control. The business side is frustrating and almost stopped me a couple times. But something Carl taught me, actually, is to ignore artificial complications. If you’re not getting financed, you’ve just got to keep looking. You have to go that extra mile. There were time when I thought about not making this film or any films at all. But then I thought, this man’s legacy wouldn’t have existed without his film, so that’s the biggest payoff.

Can you remember a time when you took a big risk and it paid off?
I think making this film was a big risk. I ran up all my credit cards to make this film. I put everything in. Whether it pays off financially or career-wise I don’t know, but it’s been an amazing opportunity to make this film. When I was financing the film I went to the European film market and said, “I need to finance this film now.” I got it financed over there, so I took a lot of risks. It’s paid off in the sense that it’s satisfying to have completed the film.

Any words of advice for other independent filmmakers?
I think you have to be willing to have your film be a success or not. That can’t be the deciding factor going forward. You have to make film for the love of making film. You have to be involved in this because you can’t do anything else. You need that passion. If you start to not feel that passion, give it a day or two and it’ll probably come back. When people think you’re crazy, which people did when I was making this film, they’re probably right, but you should keep going! [laughs]

I’d been fearing for years that, once a film about Brian Wilson was made, it would be one of those painfully formulaic biopics that have become so stale as of late. The Beach Boys frontman deserves a more artful big screen tribute than that; aside from being a veritable musical genius, he’s lived one of the most turbulent, awe-inspiring lives in documented rock and pop history.

Bill Pohlad‘s Love & Mercy, I’m relieved to report, is no soup-to-nuts hagiography, but rather an abstract, moody interpretation of two very important slices of Wilson’s life. Paul Dano plays a young Wilson in the process of writing the songs that would become Pet Sounds. An older, more mentally damaged Brian is played by John Cusack. Paul Giamatti joins Cusack’s half of the film as Dr. Eugene Landy, who in the ’80s exploited Wilson’s wealth and health, overmedicating him while he shacked up in one of Wilson’s mansions. Elizabeth Banks plays Melinda Ledbetter, Wilson’s soul mate who attempts to wrest Brian from Dr. Landy’s poisonous grip.

The film’s fragmented approach allows it to reach a stunning level of intimacy with Brian and his mind. During his visit to San Francisco this past April for the San Francisco International Film Festival, I spoke with Pohlad about the film and his experiences with Wilson, as well as the shining contributions of the rest of his team. Love & Mercy opens wide tomorrow, Friday, June 5th.

What did you like about Oren Moverman’s script that drew you to the project?
To be honest, it happened the other way around. There was a script floating around about Brian called Heroes & Villains that came to us. I read it and didn’t really like it, but I liked the idea of doing a movie about Brian Wilson. I met with Brian and Melinda and got a sense for trying to tell this story in a different way. I was never really interested in doing a biopic. In meeting them, I learned that she actually did meet him without knowing who he was and was kind of attracted to him, even though he was a bit quirky and odd. Then, she learned who he was and that all this weird stuff was going on around him. I thought it was a great way to get into his story. I was intrigued by that chapter of his life and the Pet Sounds period when he was so super-creative. It felt like those two strands would be the way to go to tell a story. We interviewed a bunch of writers, but Oren was a standout. It was one of those things where you immediately connect with somebody. We got along very well. It kind of took off from there.

I remember in high school buying the big Pet Sounds Sessions box set. The green one. I loved it. I listened to it front to back over and over. It had all these different versions of songs and Brian getting annoyed with everyone. [laughs] It was emotional for me to see those studio session recreated.
I did the same thing, buying that box set and being entranced by it and listening to it all the time. It was exciting to think about trying to recreate that. It was a magical time during the shoot, and the whole shoot honestly had a magic to it that doesn’t always happen in film production. We shot that studio section first, and it was great to be able to be in that studio, which is the actual one he recorded most of Pet Sounds in. I wanted it to have this spontaneous feel that I had appreciated in years growing up with Let It Be or Sympathy For the Devil, films like that where you’re able to get an inside look at what it’s like in the studio when guys are creating music like that. We actually hired real musicians, not actors, and gave them sheet music like they would get in a session. Paul would go in after listening to the Pet Sounds sessions over and over to get a sense of how Brian works, and we’d just let him go. We had two 16mm cameras and shot it like a documentary.

At my wedding my wife walked down the aisle to “God Only Knows.” That scene where Paul’s writing that song at the piano killed me; I got very emotional.
Shooting that was emotional, but the whole project was emotional, to be honest. The second thing we shot was the scene when he’s writing “Surf’s Up” at the piano. Paul sat and played “Surf’s Up” for, like, three hours in front of the crew. He was amazing. That was really emotional because I knew what Paul and all of us had invested in this. We were kind of doing this shot-by-shot recreation from a documentary. The “God Only Knows” thing was equally emotional because, yes, I love that song. It’s such a great song. I wanted to capture this progression of moments. When you first see him it’s like he’s just coming up with this song, and then it develops. He gets more sure of it, and by the end he’s playing it for his father. Showing that progression was really special.

Is it tricky selling John Cusack as Brian Wilson since, frankly, he looks nothing like him?
First of all, he does kind of look like him.

You think so? I don’t see it.
He just looks like him from another period. If you look at shots of Brian from the ’80s, he’s this big, bearded behemoth, almost. Then, he’d look like this skinny, emaciated guy. He was working with Landy, and his weight was going up and down. We were really trying to figure out which look we’d go with and who would portray him. I watched the Don Was documentary I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, which was shot in the early ’90s. There’s a shot early on of him in a leather jacket, and he looks like John. People say they don’t look alike occasionally, but Melinda and Brian say to them, “Yes he does!”

But I didn’t want them to be doing things like using prosthetics to make John look more like Brian or Paul. I also didn’t encourage John and Paul to work together. I wanted them to find their own, organic way into the character. You kind of let them find it. John did it by spending time with Brian and the Smile sessions. Paul did it by spending time with the Pet Sounds sessions and trying to get a sense for Brian back in that time. He said working with Brian wouldn’t have been as productive as John working with Brian.

John got Brian’s walk almost exactly, with his arms turned forward.
I’ve had psychologists and doctors say that the way John walks and the way he holds his hands are all indications of when somebody is over-medicated or getting the wrong medication.

Paul resembles Brian so much.
It’s spooky at times.

What was it like meeting Brian for the first time?
It was amazing. The first thing I’ll admit is that I grew up as a Beatles guy, and I think that’s good, in a way. There were a lot of people who wanted to be involved in the picture because they loved Brian, but it’s almost like they were too close, too big of fans. I’ve gotten more into Brian and his music over the years, and very into it about 15-20 years ago through Pet Sounds. But I think it’s good to have some objectivity. When I met Brian, it was a thrill, but I didn’t fall over. The key thing is to represent the human side of him. The celebrity and musical genius side is important, and we want to get that across, but what I want more than anything is to be able to relate to this guy. If you want to put him up on a pedestal and survey his life, you do that in a biopic. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to relate to this guy. I think the mental health issues he went through carry a more important message than saying how great a guy he is. It’s about how we treat people and how we make assumptions about people who have those challenges.

Giamatti is killer.
It’s tough, because a character like Landy…[pauses]. I couldn’t find anybody who had anything positive to say about him. He’s dead, so we don’t have a lot to go on, but you don’t want to create a one-dimensional character. You want to relate to what drove him to this and brought him to this place. There are a lot of subtleties, and having Paul Giamatti navigate those waters is huge.

One of my favorite moments in the movie is when Elizabeth Banks opens that office door in Paul’s face. She looked like such a warrior.
All of that happened [in real life]. She was in the office with the door locked and he was yelling outside. Honestly, with Brian’s story, there are so many things that happened that you would just never put in a script because they’re unbelievable. [laughs] At the end when Brian walks out in front of Melinda’s car, we struggled with that for a long time. We thought, nobody’s going to believe that! It sounds like a movie thing! It literally happened that way. Brian walked out in front of the car and she almost ran into him. As a filmmaker, it’s hard to pull it off without people thinking it’s a movie convention or something.

Favorite Beach Boys song?
“God Only Knows.” But it’s tough. “Don’t Worry Baby” would be up there.

“Good Vibrations” is my number two.
“Surf’s Up” is really great. I could go on and on.

Talk about your approach to sound. I assume that’s high priority in a film like this.
Oh, totally. Brian has aural hallucinations, not visual. Your default thing in a movie is to put all these weird things on-screen and create a “trip.” But this is what he’s hearing in his head, all these disparate chords and harmonies. They’re a part of his genius, but he can’t turn it off, so it becomes part of his nightmare as well. I wanted to figure out a way to depict that so people understood it. I thought “Revolution Number 9” off the Beatles’ White Album would be a good model. We sat down with Atticus Ross and he got it immediately. Beyond the “mind trips,” the score itself is Brian’s music, just rearranged. We’ve taken the stems from the original recordings, taken one from one song and one from another, and weaved them together. I hope Atticus’ story of what he did on this movie comes out, because it’s extraordinary.

I loved how audacious those hallucinations are. You’ll hear a weird sound mixed very hard to the right, and then a loud chord all the way on the left. Crazy stuff.
Our sound mixer Chris Jenkins’ contributions are as valuable as Atticus’ or mine.

What was the hardest thing for Brian to watch?
Brian’s quite hard to read. He’s very asocial. It’s not his thing. But I wanted to make sure he was onboard and made sure the film [was credible], so we had a table read for him early on, just the script. At times I thought he wasn’t paying attention at all or that he was sleeping. An hour later, he’d come back with these really insightful notes. The guy was listening the whole time! When he saw a rough cut the first time, he watched it alone. I heard he liked it, but I didn’t get to watch it with him until Toronto. He never shared what the hardest thing about it was, but he says reliving that whole process is hard for him.

He’s a curious guy. if you ask him about Landy now, he’d say, “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Landy,” even though he knows everything Landy did to him. He still sees it in a childlike way, a purity that’s just fascinating. But then, for the rough cut, he said we were being too kind to Landy. He thought our portrayal was a little softer than he actually was.

Opening this Friday at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, Señoritas is the debut feature of filmmaker Lina Rodriguez. The film follows Alejandra, a young girl living in Bogotá, Colombia, spending most of her days partying and hanging out with her friends. Rodriguez is based in Toronto, but she went back to her hometown to film the independently funded feature. Rodriguez’s personal connection to her film shines through, and her skills behind the camera establish her as someone to watch in the coming years.

Lina Rodriguez was kind enough to talk with us about her background as an experimental filmmaker, her distinct style, and what she hopes to accomplish next. To find out more about Señoritas, check out the trailer at the end of the interview, or head here to buy tickets.

Could you go into your background with experimental film and how you handled the transition to filming a narrative feature?
I studied film production at York University here in Toronto, and once I graduated, I started working a lot on Super 8mm and made several experimental short films. [It was] really more for survival, in the sense that working on Super 8mm gave me a beautiful freedom to take the camera during my travels and document moments without pressure. It allowed me to keep making films, at my pace, and with my own hands. During those years after university, I also started doing some installation and performance art work, which kept me active and curious.

Señoritas is a continuation of the artistic and philosophical concerns that I have explored in my experimental films as well as in my installation and performance art, which have focused on the exploration of self and the performance of the self (the act of being) both through my work in film and video formal experiments with light and shadow, the texture and lighting to create atmosphere, and editing to create rhythm and tone. I am interested in thinking about how people’s emotional lives occupy a space on the surface of their bodies, on the impact that these bodies have in space and time, and in the presence and power of an action, its consequences, both inside and outside the frame.

Were there any reasons beyond your personal connection to Bogotá that made you want to shoot there?
Señoritas stems from my experience of growing up as a woman in Bogotá, but also, from my interest in searching for a different way to represent the experience of being and moving as a woman in Bogotá today.

Throughout the process of making the film, it was very clear to me that I wanted to be open to the stories and experiences that I was going to encounter during my research, as well as during the casting and shooting processes, and it is thanks to this work methodology that the film was able to draw from the energy that the present brings in a very natural and organic way. What moves me to make films is that process of discovery and the hope that the actions and relationships that you write on paper will acquire a new life and a new sense of mystery once they are inhabited by people with flesh and blood.

There’s an air of mystery to Alejandra. We get a sense of what she’s feeling and experiencing, but nothing is explicitly laid out.
A portrait of a young woman could have been done using the fast, obvious and immediate aesthetic that is common in more commercial films, television, YouTube and music videos, the aesthetic that sells us how young people are supposedly living today. I could have also used more pronounced brushstrokes to tell the audience more clearly and directly “how to interact” with the protagonist, and what to think of her and the choices that she makes. But as my interest was to reflect on how Alejandra’s daily life and her body and body language’s relationship to her surroundings give us hints about her inner life, it was very clear to me that I wanted to create an atmosphere that would invite the audience to take the time to observe instead of judge. I feel that in a way Señoritas is an invitation to decipher what’s behind her face, her body, and I’m glad that the sense of mystery is still there as my goal was to get close to her, yet keep her as a question mark, because I wanted to articulate that inability to “understand” who she is at this time of her life.

For me filmmaking is interesting because I face it as a process of constant discovery, and I disagree with the idea that there is only one access road for the audience to connect with a film, or a character. Sure, that’s what they teach in screenwriting classes or at the multiplexes, but that’s not what interests me. That’s what unidirectional news are for, to spread laziness and a passive acceptance to let others think and solve things on our behalf. The possibilities of creating meaning from the relationship (montage) of images and sounds is infinite. I’m not interested in making a film about someone who is this or that, so my job becomes to tell the audience how to feel when and why. During production, and even after it, I wanted to keep that air of mystery around María, who plays Alejandra. There is still a lot about her, as a character and as an actress, that I do not know, and I find that interesting. It’s that curiosity and risk of not knowing for sure what keeps moving me to make films.

When I started thinking about Señoritas, I started with a web of images, sounds, ideas, emotions and questions and I realized fairly quickly, that I was already on the opposite side of the tradition and habits that are normally used in “narrative” cinema, but I decided to go for it anyway. I feel that if I had known the answers to my questions before making the film, there would have been no need to make the film and I should have rather written a manifesto or a speech, or an instruction manual to repair a refrigerator, so everything is clear and laid out.

There are some aspects of Señoritas that stuck out to me, and I’d like it if you could talk a bit about them. One of them is the sound design. Interior scenes always have an awareness of what’s going on outside, like the sounds of traffic outside Alejandra’s apartment.
Yes, for me sound is an essential element in the atmospheric and spatial construction of a film. I wanted to create a contrast between the tension and relationship that exists in Alejandra’s public life (her life in front of others, with others, for others) and her private life. I worked with Roberta Ainstein, who did the Sound Design, to build a dynamic web of rhythms and contrasts that invite the audience to find their way around on their own and force them to think about the relationship between sound and image. I wanted to create an atmosphere that would serve as a bridge so they can access emotions and ideas in a different way and participate more actively in how meaning is revealed, not only through what is said and seen, but also by engaging their attention with those off screen voices and sounds.

Another aspect is the depth of field. There’s a lot of shallow focus throughout the film. Could you explain a bit about the film’s use of focus?
I used Egon Schiele’s expressionism as a visual reference. In the same way that this Austrian painter granted vital importance to the world of internal emotions using composition, color and the body (the face as much as the entire body), I wanted, as I said before, to reveal the emotional life of the characters through the very form of their bodies, the cadence of their movements, how their bodies occupy spaces (their position within the frame, their presence), and their relationship with other bodies. In order to achieve this, Alejandro Coronado (the Director of Photography) and I, decided to use a shallow focus as a tool to highlight gestures, stillness and movement.

Duration is a key part of the film’s style as well. Did you always plan to use long, uninterrupted takes? What interests you about that specific style?
I wanted to take the time to observe movement within the frame, as a way to decipher what body language can reveal about the character’s inner lives. The long takes were an organic approach that came from my research, casting and the process of directing the actors, so its not something that I knew ahead of time, it came from the process itself. As my interest was more focused on the creation of atmosphere and rhythm, the long take became a great tool to push the possibility of the construction of meaning beyond the text, and beyond what some call the “juice of a scene,” which is the moment when a scene reveals to us it’s practical purpose, so it can die and we move on. I’m interested in the aftermath of that “purpose,” in the time that it takes us to get there, and the time it takes to get past that point.

You edited Señoritas with Brad Deane. What was the editing process like for the two of you?
After going through the process of writing and shooting, one can be tempted to make editing decisions that conform to those pre-meditated ideas that triggered the film. One can be tempted to execute these ideas and force the footage to fit the original plan. As I said, my interest in cinema comes from the process of discovery, so when Brad and I started the editing process, it was very important for us to allow ourselves to see the footage with “new eyes.” As Peter Kubelka says, once you start editing, you must surrender and ask “Film, here you are, what can you do for me?”

We feel that a cut is an action in itself, and as such, it’s a very important decision that cannot be taken lightly. We used each cut as a tool to interrupt the flow of the actions, to create a rhythm and deepen the atmosphere that had been created through the mise-en-scène and sound design. We edited the film following a strategy that accentuates and punctuates each scene and heightens the contrast between the scenes, instead of the more traditional way of cutting, which is aimed at making the parts invisible and continuous to give the illusion of a whole.

Finally, what are your plans for the future? Are you working on anything else at the moment?
I just got back from doing auditions and some location scouting for This Time Tomorrow, my second feature film, which we’ll shoot in January 2015 in Bogotá. Señoritas multiplied my strength to continue searching in my own way and at my own rhythm, and I plan to continue growing slowly, and working within an independent production model, that allows me to surround myself with close people who I trust and who are willing to continue taking risks with me.

Watch Señoritas trailer

This past Thursday we chatted with the stars of Alex of Venice, which closed out this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival at the Castro Theatre. Director Chris Messina, stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Don Johnson, and SFIFF57 Director of Programming Rachel Rosen spoke with us about Messina’s directorial debut, the festival buzz, and why Winstead will never call Don Johnson “Daddy”.

In Charlie Paul’s For No Good Reason, the British filmmaker allows us a peek into the world of artist Ralph Steadman, one of the key Gonzo visionaries and good friend of Hunter S. Thompson. The film chronicles not only his career, but his artistic method, capturing the way Steadman slaps the canvas with paint and manipulates the splatter until it resembles something out of a fever dream.

Paul and his wife Lucy, the film’s producer, sat down with us in San Francisco to talk about recording Ralph’s artwork for 15 years, Ralph’s hatred of drips, crafting an unconventional film for an unconventional artist, emulating Ralph’s artistic process in filmmaking, and more.

So you had this idea of recording Ralph Steadman before it was possible technologically?
Charlie: Absolutely. The reason the whole film came about was that I was actually shooting this process on film. And I went to Ralph because I heard he had shot his art with camera above his desk that he could record with by pressing a button. It was fascinating.

So I asked him if I could record him with this camera above his desk and if every time he did a [painting] he would press a button to start recording. Ralph, being a great embracer of technology, said he would try it. And that was 15 years ago. Ever since, every picture Ralph has ever made has been recorded using this process.

His artistic process is incredible. Can you remember the first time you saw him at work and what that was like? It’s unlike anything I’ve seen.
Charlie: Well, it was quite shocking to be quite honest. Other artists that I have worked with would paint away with a constant process. Ralph is explosive is in his art. He stands up there, he whacks it down. As the ink’s moving around, running down the page, he manipulates it and adds scratches and that kind of stuff.

Lucy: It’s a very live exchange between him, his canvas, and his creation. It’s a real live communication between him and the page.

Charlie: We do a great Q&A with Ralph. We’re doing one with Pixar tomorrow. He’s on Skype with a laptop in his studio, and within 15 minutes he will whack a picture out. It’s fantastic to watch. You basically have to lift his art very carefully so it doesn’t drip. He hates drips.

He hates drips?!
Charlie: He doesn’t like drips. You might have noticed it’s all full of splatters. He loves splatters. So you have to be very careful how you move his art from the table. So while it looks like Ralph is out of control, he is actually it’s a very controlled process.

His art is explosive, but he doesn’t seem like an explosive kind of guy. Talk about that juxtaposition.
Charlie: That is Ralph. Ralph is the man you see in the film. The objective of the film is to show the difference between the two. Ralph is lucky that he has a way of expressing what is going on inside. So I guess if he didn’t have his art to offload those ideas, he might become an angry and volatile person. But Ralph is a very stable, warm, and generous man who is a pleasure to be around. Not a dangerous man like Hunter would have been for example.

Can you both tell me a story about you and Ralph?
Charlie: After [being around him for] 15 years, you have a lot of memories. [Laughs] For me, seeing these sentimental pieces of art appear out of nowhere was, as a filmmaker, the most amazing privilege to come across. The highlight of any given day was for Ralph to create a piece of art that I knew would make it into the film.

Lucy: He’s quite unpredictable. He’s very warm and generous, but he is a little bit crazy as well. So in a way it’s not the kind of big stories; it’s just those little moments.

Charlie: The other fantastic thing about working with Ralph is that he is never parted with his art. It’s always in the studio. He only sends out reproductions to magazines and so on. So on a regular basis I would open a drawer and in there would be a piece of art which I haven’t seen for 30 or 40 years. For me it was mind blowing.

The subject matter demands the documentary not be conventional. Talk about the style of the film and doing him justice in that way.
Charlie: I made the film to reflect Ralph’s art. And Ralph’s art is full of scrappy bits and pieces. Ralph would use montages, center-tape, ink, paper, and draw things and stick things. So that was a technique that I felt I had to use. The film is full of bits of edge-of-frame and clapper boards because that is Ralph’s art. I had to make the filmmaking process the same as Ralph’s art-making process if I was going to reflect Ralph’s art.

You’re right. On top of that, the idea of making a conventional film about an unconventional artist would have been defeatist in the first place.

What was the point through this 15 year process that you thought this had to be a film, not just a recording of him painting?
Charlie: I wanted to the film to be like a piece of art. So I recognized if the work I was going to do was to reflect Ralph’s art, it would have to be in a medium that was a standalone medium, much like Ralph’s art is standalone art. So that’s how I realized it was going to be a film rather than a TV documentary.

Lucy: [To Charlie] When you first started out, you weren’t making a film necessarily. You were just recording and observing your artistic hero. Probably about 5 years ago, the people that we work with and myself said, “Charlie, this is phenomenal footage you’ve got here. We need to make film out of this!” Then the process started with more seriousness in producing a specific outcome.

The editing process took about 3 years. Because Charlie works in such a visual way, it was difficult to find an editor that Charlie was going to respect was willing to let go of this project that was so personal. So we interviewed quite a few editors.

You’re so fortunate that you’re friends with Ralph and that your access to him is so unprecedented. Was there a measure of fear that, because this film was such a long process, it had to be spot-on in reflecting who he is?
Charlie: I think it was the amount of time I took to make the film which allowed it to be so spot-on. If you have a schedule that you have to meet then you have to bridge gaps and try to make things up. I was fortunate enough that, if there was something in the edit that wasn’t delivering, I could go back to Ralph and discuss what we could do to fill that gap. So Ralph might respond with a painting or give a bit of advice. It allowed the film to end naturally.

Lucy: And also with Ralph, there isn’t a way that you can get him to do things. If you point him one direction, it’s almost like a natural instinct for him to go the other direction. So really you were observing, not pushing him one way. There was no comprising.

Charlie: Absolutely. Ralph definitely drove the artist creation within the film. So my job was to find a way to make a cohesive film. It took a long time because if I wanted something specific, I couldn’t ever ask Ralph to do it. I would just have to wait for it to naturally evolve.

That’s interesting because the way you describe that process sounds like his process.
Charlie: Absolutely. My clear objective in the film was to represent Ralph’s art and his process as closely to his art that filmmaking could be. So in the same way that Ralph will let the splat lead his way, each day we filmed I let Ralph’s first intention dictate how that day went. Therefore, it was a privilege was a filmmaker to be led that way rather than be worried about to fit your film. That was never a concern.

What characteristic of Ralph’s do you identify with most?
Charlie: Ralph’s unrelenting efforts to make the world a better place is what attracted me in the first place as an artist. I think Ralph’s integrity and his intention is one of the greatest things an artist can have.

The music in the film suggests that you’re aiming at a younger generation. Was that important to you?
Charlie: Absolutely. Ralph has been around for many years and many people know about Ralph through the times of Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and all of the classic books that Ralph has worked on with great literary artists of our time. So for me it was about making Ralph accessible to a new generation. It was very important to me to make Ralph contemporary and not just someone of the past.

Lucy: The message of his art holds such resonance for young people today as well. Because he is very live and very current. He’s still commenting on what he feels about the world today.

Charlie: Yeah. And the wonderful thing about good art is that it’s not tainted by time. Pieces of art that were made 40 years ago are as fresh today as they were then. So there was no reason to treat Ralph’s art like archive material. It’s relevant, current art. So that’s what I thought that a younger audience will appreciate this as much as an older audience, so to exclude them would be the wrong thing.

Have you had conversations with young people who saw the film that weren’t familiar with any of his concepts?
Lucy: Yes. They were blown away by it.

Charlie: Yeah, it’s been a marvelous thing to introduce Ralph to a new generation. It’s an honor.

Are you still recording him?
Charlie: Yes. I saw him last week and he still has the camera above his desk. I’ve given him one button to press, so when he goes into the studio and press the button, all the lights turn on and the camera activates. He still does this process. He is creating more now than he has in years.

What’s great about this process of him pressing the button and taking these shots is that it reveals a new dimension to his art that you can’t see by simply looking at the final product.
Charlie: Yeah, he is as amazed as I am by the process. Artists forget what they are doing as they go along. They’re absorbed in the moment. That process is important to me because coming out of art college I was disillusioned with the way films were representing artists. The habit is to move around a finished painting, often with a third-party describing what you’re looking at. I always felt that wasn’t the artist intention, to have a critic describe the finished process.

Here, the pace of the film is dictated by the artist. He can press the button lots of times and the film slows down, if he does one it speeds up. So the artist has full control in the medium he is working in. And it’s been great to take it to Ralph and have him respond in his own way.

In the small town of Chadron, Nebraska, math professor Steven Haataja vanished without a trace shortly after starting his new job. It took several months to find his body, and the discovery only brought on more questions. Haataja was found tied up to a tree, burnt beyond recognition, and there was no evidence of anyone else’s involvement. The case remains open to this day, with some believing Haataja either killed himself or was brutally murdered.

Chadron resident and writer Poe Ballantine was in the middle of working on his memoir “Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere” when filmmaker Dave Jannetta contacted him. Jannetta was interested in Poe’s memoir along with the Haataja case, and after discussions Jannetta came to Chadron to film a documentary surrounding the mystery. Ballentine weaves his own life story, Haataja’s death and the unique qualities of Chadron together in his memoir, and Jannetta uses a similar approach. Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere (the doc adopts the same title as the book) is not merely a crime story. Jannetta focuses on Ballantine’s own life, his family, and how he came to Chadron, while also profiling Chadron’s people and history.

In anticipation for the film’s world première at Hot Docs, Mr. Jannetta and Mr. Ballentine were gracious enough to answer some questions through e-mail about the film. The two men have very different personalities, but both share a mutual passion for the topics covered in their respective works. We talk about the difference between fiction and non-fiction filmmaking, the relationship between the book and film, facing obstacles while filming, what they hope the two works will achieve, and much more. Read below for the full interview.

Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere will have its world première at Hot Docs in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. You can find more information on the film here, and to find out more information about the festival (including all films playing, along with when to see them) go to www.hotdocs.ca.

Poe, your memoir was published last summer, and now Dave Jannetta’s documentary is premiering at Hot Docs. How do you feel about getting to see yourself on the big screen?

Poe Ballentine: I don’t really enjoy looking at or listening to myself, but Dave went to a lot of trouble so that I didn’t look like an idiot, so I’m going to try and be as cooperative as possible. I’m excited about the film because so much work went into it, and it’s fun to watch.

And Dave, how do you feel about getting to premiere your film at such a big event?

Dave Jannetta: After Love and Terror was accepted to Hot Docs I said to a friend, “It feels nice to be the pretty, popular cheerleader for a minute.” He thought captain of the football team was apt, but you get the idea. It’s difficult to get people to give a damn about anything and Hot Docs has definitely greased those skids. Making films independently is a slog and you can end up feeling like you’re creating in a vacuum. It’s hard to get solid, objective feedback. If festivals reject you they send form emails telling you it’s not your fault, there were just too many great films this year and “we’re sorry but we can’t tell you why yours wasn’t one of them.” You get really good at accepting rejection. I’m not positive what to expect from Hot Docs but they’ve been incredibly straightforward, helpful, and kind – exactly what a filmmaker hopes for. So I’m excited and thankful to be part of such a great festival.

[To Poe Ballantine] How did you feel when Dave Jannetta approached you about making the documentary? What made you decide to go along with it?

PB: I’m flattered anytime someone takes interest in my work, but because I work alone I thought the odds were pretty long of anything panning out between us. But he turned out to be everything you’d want in a documentarian, sharp-eyed, whip smart, funny, hardworking, detail-oriented, eager to learn, and you never knew what he might do next. I’d turn around and there he’d be in a Highland kilt, a bagpipe in his hands.

In the film, some of the people you write about in your memoir are able to speak for themselves, including your family. How did your wife and son feel about participating in the documentary? Did you learn anything new from Mr. Jannetta’s interviews with your family and the citizens of Chadron?

PB: My son is thrilled to be in a movie, my wife not so much. However I think she’s secretly pleased to be getting her beautiful mug on the big screen. Whenever you get a camera on someone and ask them poignant questions something juicy [is] bound to spill. Loren Zimmerman, the ex-LAPD homicide detective who unofficially took over the investigation, admitting that he was the most likely suspect in the murder of Steven Haataja was particularly enlightening [I thought].

[To Dave Jannetta] You’ve already written and directed one feature. Did you deliberately decide to go for non-fiction with your next film, and how would you compare the two types of filmmaking?

DJ: I often tell people that Rachel & Diana (my first feature) was my film school. It’s not a perfect film but I learned a ton. After Rachel and Diana I continued to work on narrative screenplays and was trying to make a living as a freelance filmmaker. That’s when I began thinking about possible documentary projects because it seemed to me they’d be less resource intensive but equally challenging. Then I came across a short description of Poe’s then in progress memoir [of] Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere.

I was most surprised at how the process of making narrative films vs. documentaries overlap and where they diverge. I’m not an avant-garde filmmaker, so at the most basic level I’m just trying to tell a really interesting story. It’s always the driving force. With a narrative film you basically get everything in place before you begin: screenplay, actors, locations, schedules, crew, etc. You should really be able to envision the final film from day one. Conversely, while making a documentary a lot of those things come in the reverse order. You have a vision of the finished project in mind but the capricious nature of the process doesn’t lend itself to rigidity.

Your film settles into a kind of rhythm as it goes along, going back and forth between the Haataja mystery and profiling Chadron itself. Was it difficult to develop this kind of structure during production? Did you ever have trouble in deciding what to focus on, or where it would fit within your film while editing?

DJ: Oh man – it was arduous to put it mildly. There were always three elements that were going to form the foundation of the film: Poe’s story, Steven Haataja’s story, and the story of Chadron itself. I was very familiar with Poe’s work before approaching him about doing [the film]. He spoke my language and I figured that what I knew of his life could turn into an interesting film no matter what. When we began shooting it was well before [Poe’s memoir] was published, so all I knew about it was a short description I’d read. For me, the unsolved death was intriguing but I had no clue where it would lead or how fulfilling that story thread would be. But I did know that I did not want the film to be an archetypal “true crime” documentary or procedural. And as soon as I arrived in Chadron on a scout trip and began meeting and talking to people I believed that if I could effectively capture a snapshot of what the town was like, people would find it interesting.

Poe Ballentine believes Steven Haataja was murdered, but your film gives time to different theories surrounding his death. How did your opinion on Mr. Haataja’s death develop while you were making your film, and where do you personally stand on the matter now?

DJ: It was like a pendulum. There isn’t a great deal of objective information surrounding the Haataja case so a good portion of what I was hearing was hearsay or not necessarily related to the death. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t have value. It was strange because I’d often talk with three or four people in a row who had similar opinions and it would really start to make sense. But I’d go back and look over the evidence or talk to three more people with divergent viewpoints and my opinion would flip. It’s really difficult not to suffer from confirmation bias – to have a preconceived conclusion and place extra emphasis on the evidence that supports it – but I think it’s imperative to keep an open mind to all possibilities. Occam’s razor can be helpful, but the assumptions start piling up pretty quickly and one hypotheses ends up as riddled with holes as the next. While I wouldn’t go on record saying I think it was a cold blooded murder I will say that I think, at the very least, someone else was involved or knows what happened. I realize that’s a cop-out and the fact that I couldn’t get a definitive answer is (in my opinion) a failing of the film. But life’s endings are rarely served neat and I think an ambiguous conclusion is fitting. At least for now. Steven’s story is incomplete – it’s built upon first and second hand accounts, conjecture, rumor, and a few solid pieces of evidence. But I guess that’s how history is usually written.

Since the documentary isn’t exactly an adaptation, how would the two of you characterize the relationship between the film and memoir?

DJ: I’d say the film and the memoir parallel each other and that I hope the experience of one enriches the other.

PB: Even though it has a lot of fancy writing in it, the core of my memoir is journalistic. Dave is more interested in faces, landscape, local color, and letting people talk. We’ve both examined the way in which reality is filtered and altered by whoever’s turn it is to tell a story, which explains why collaborative accounts such as news and even history itself so often miss the mark. Both of our projects are grounded in the central mystery and the portraiture of a small town reacting to a spectacularly tragic event, but I think Dave is more stylistically content with an open ending. While text gives you more room for laughs, asides, and waxing philosophical, film is better at straight exposition. We also attempt to retrace Steven’s freezing moonlit journey across private ranch land to the place where he was found, and I think the film does a better job than my book of showing how prohibitive and unlikely that venture was, at least on foot. Both of our examinations were intended to invite more information in the hopeful solution of this case. In this and many other ways I think our two projects make good companions.

Mr. Haataja’s family have publicly expressed their dislike with your documentary along with Poe Ballantine’s memoir. Since you didn’t have access to the people who knew Steven Haataja best, my question is how you, as a documentary filmmaker, try to compensate for these kinds of restrictions. How do you adapt yourself to give a fair portrayal to your subject(s)/subject matter, even if you aren’t able to include some key perspectives?

DJ: Perspective is the key word in your question. I did talk with Steven’s family early on, and their discontent with the book and film are articulated on various blogs and message boards. I had to do a lot of soul searching and tried to keep up a dialogue with them throughout the process but it’s not much fun to be reviled. Who should be able to tell Steven’s story? Is it exploitative for people who didn’t know him to undertake projects that outline some of the details of his life and death? It’s a moral grey area and I’ve had emails from people who knew Steven both excoriating me and thanking me. But that’s where the most interesting stories live. Black and white is too easy, it’s boring. It’s when the questions you’re asking are in shades of grey that you’ll tend to find the most value. All that being said – without Steven’s family on board [and for budgetary reasons] I made the decision fairly early on to restrict the perspective to the town of Chadron. Even though Steven only lived in town a short time before he disappeared I feel like I was able to find people who had an understanding of him as a person and who could communicate the essence of who he was. The tragedy of Steven is only one element of the film. If it were entirely about Steven and his death I do think [it would be exploitative].

I will say, however, that the process was made much more difficult after an edict from [Steven’s former employer] forbid their employees to discuss the case with me. This was after a meeting in which their director of communications seemed amenable to the idea of the documentary. I’ve even heard rumors that they now put something in their contracts for new employees saying they can’t discuss the Haataja case. What are they trying to hide?

The memoir wasn’t actually finished while filming took place (It was published in the summer of 2013, and you can buy a copy here). Did the filming process influence the writing process, and vice versa?

DJ: When I first arrived in Chadron, Poe had an umpteenth draft of the book that was basically shelved. He hadn’t been able to get it right, was worried about how the town would react, and was almost relieved that it was resting quietly in the shadows. He even remarked to me at one point that he hoped it could be published posthumously. I decided that I wouldn’t read a draft right away because I wanted the film to be its own entity. But I was interacting with [Poe] daily while we were filming so his ideas were seeping into the film whether I liked it or not. As I started conducting interviews he went back to his book and started [revising]. After about a year I read a draft of the book and we were able to talk more clearly. On subsequent trips we worked hard, watched movies, discussed books, ate homemade seafood étouffée, drank, and above all talked about stories. And these things, more than the book itself, impacted the actual production and editing process.

PB: Dave’s film gave me a chance to review every aspect of the case from another perspective, so it’s a much more thorough, balanced, and accurate treatment than it would’ve been without his intervention. I also started carrying around a megaphone and calling everyone “babe.”

What do the both of you hope Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere will achieve, and are you concerned with how Chadron will react?

DJ: The case of Steven Haataja’s death is still unsolved, and I think there’s more to the story. I hope that the combination of the film and book are able to knock something loose and lead to a resolution. This might not happen right away but the film will be around for people to examine. Maybe in 50 years when I’m sucking pureed brussels sprouts through a straw in a convalescent hospital someone will finally be able to put all the pieces together and figure it out.

As one of the interviewees says in the film, “If it had been a fucking football coach who disappeared they would’ve called in the National Guard.” I’ll add that if Steven was an attractive blonde female or privileged white male they wouldn’t have rested until they had all the answers. Part of the tragedy is that Steven was a quiet, gentle, cerebral wallflower. This story wouldn’t have been told if they’d found him right away. But I don’t blame Chadron as much as contemporary America. I loved it out there, made some great friends, and hope to go back often. I don’t think I portrayed anything or anyone unfairly but that doesn’t mean I won’t piss some people off. So yeah, I’m a bit concerned. But as Poe wrote to me in an early email, “It’s quite possible, since Haataja was burned alive, that there is still a killer at large, and dozens of citizens, some dangerous, will not be happy to see their accounts presented or their deeds come to light, and so the risk in this is not only artistic, but that’s of course the very quality that makes it fascinating.”

I also hope the film does its part to nudge Poe from the literary shadows. And I’d obviously like audiences to see and enjoy the documentary, to spend a little bit of time pondering the positive effect of one man’s life on a small community, the way in which facts sometimes have very little to do with the truth, and that the truth is gossamer anyway.

PB: Mr. Jannetta and I have discussed this extensively. We both want standing ovations and frenzied women ripping off our clothes. We’d also like to put Chadron on the map and prove once and for all that the place called Nebraska really exists. As with the book, most will be pleased by the documentary, but there will be grumps, rubes, dorks, loafers, and killers who’ll choose not to like it. Vive la difference!

The thing about ambient music is that it takes patience. Not only to compose it, but also to listen to it. We are naturally drawn to narratives, well at least I and most of the people I know are, to me ambient music has the most complex narratives to understand, but once you’ve understood it, it’s amazing. One of those talented composers is Andy Othling, the mastermind behind the ambient/post-rock project Lowercase Noises.

The latest album from Andy, This Is For Our Sins releases on April 30th. Inspired by the story of the Lykov family, a Russian family that was completely isolated from the rest of the world for 40 years, each track represents a moment in the lives of this intriguing family, whose lone survivor still lives in isolation. You can read more about the Lykov family at the Smithsonian. Andy released the music video for one of the tracks called “Famine and the Death of a mother” earlier this month. The song is a prime example of how complex the compositions on this album are and the impact of the emotions that the story holds. Previous albums have featured an emphasis on guitar because of Andy’s mastery of the instrument, but surprisingly the songs on this album have a larger diversity in instruments, some with no guitar at all. This may come as a big surprise to some long-time listeners, but I doubt it’ll be something to really complain about since the composition fits together so well.

Andy and I chatted for a while and took some questions from his fans, the entire hangout is below for your viewing pleasure. This Is For Our Sins releases April 30th, you can pre-order at the link below. When it comes out, I highly recommend sitting down and listening to the album all the way through in order, there are some songs that might not make sense by themselves.

This Is For Our Sins Pre-Order
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I Am a Ghost is a classic definition of low budget indie filmmaking. Shot over seven days in a mostly DIY fashion, I Am a Ghost follows Emily (Anna Ishida), a young woman who doesn’t realize that she’s a ghost who’s still haunting her old house. The current residents hire a medium (Jeannie Barroga) to remove Emily’s spirit and, through their conversations, try to figure out what’s keeping Emily from moving on to the other side. H.P. Mendoza’s talent shines through every frame, relying on atmosphere and form to make one of the more original indie horrors to come out in the last few years.

Mendoza took out some time from his busy schedule to talk to us about what he calls his “tiny movie.” We talk about the state of horror today, the various influences seen throughout the film, the spooky location and the casting process among other things. Read below for the full interview, and be sure to read our review. You can find more information about I Am a Ghost at www.iamaghost.com.

Your film is one of the more original takes on the horror genre I’ve seen recently, mainly because of its focus on form which tends to be rare with horror films today. How do you feel about the horror genre’s output today, and did you make sure to try and avoid using some of the more familiar genre elements while working on the film?

The truth is that, while I love horror films, I started giving up on them. I haven’t been scared in a really long time. And I’m constantly daydreaming of new ways to scare people. I’ve wanted to do a formalist film for a while but never thought I’d have the guts to do it, especially when I’m at a point where I’m “supposed” to be doing the right thing if I want to be noticed. I Am a Ghost was one of those scripts I wrote and stashed, thinking it would be the film I’d eventually do when I get enough “clout” or whatever to do anything I want. But one day I had lunch with Julia Kwan, who directed Eve and the Fire Horse, and I was trying to sell her on this idea I had for a comedy about California’s Proposition 8 and she said “I think I Am a Ghost should be your next film.” And I laughed! At first. When I saw that she wasn’t laughing, I realized that if I was going to make a horror film, now was the time.

The first 15 minutes mostly involve watching Emily repeatedly perform different chores and actions throughout the house with no real context or explanation. It’s a bold way to start things off. Did you always envision starting the movie that way, and were you ever worried about how viewers would react to it?

Whenever you decide to do something that a lot of people would consider “bold”, you have to accept that an equal number of people will consider it “stupid” or “pretentious”. I struggled with that early on. The screenplay also has little parentheticals that say “NOTE: I know all of this seems weird, but please trust me. Keep reading.” I was in love with the idea of alienating the audience from the very start. Even Rick Burkhardt, who plays the demon in the film, told me that I should be careful seeing as how I’m giving the audience an experimental film for 15 minutes and then suddenly thrusting them into a two person theatre-piece. But I really do believe that those first fifteen minutes are crucial to enjoying the rest of the film. I think that when all of the weird supernatural stuff starts to really hit the fan, you need to have seen those experimental images to know exactly why these ghostly occurrences are so disturbing.

One of the major themes in I Am a Ghost involves repetition and memory. One of the more interesting and creepier aspects of the film was how the only memories Emily preserved were about mundane things as opposed to something more exciting or memorable. Can you explain what interests you about memories and how they affect us?

The challenge I had when I was coming up with these mundane memories was to write them in a way that made them memorable. Like having Emily yawn in an overly theatrical manner. I think I wrote those exact words in the script: EMILY yawns in an overly theatrical manner. Or having her yawn in a really awkward way while she fries eggs. Anna Ishida, who plays Emily, kept saying that she found Emily disturbing. She’d be on set, re-reading the script and saying “What is WRONG with her?!? I want to figure her out!” And during the shoot, she was aware that I’d be cutting to black at the most inopportune times, so it must have been pretty alienating for her, as well. Someone at a film festival asked me why I thought memories are so scary. And I told her that when I was a kid, I used to have strange fears. I used to play dodgeball with my friends and think, “I’m having a great time, right now. What if this isn’t happening? What if I’m actually 90 years old and everyone around me has died and I’m so sad and lonely that I’m stuck in this memory of being happy?” I was a fun kid.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining felt like a major influence throughout, but I was more surprised at how much the film reminded me of European cinema. The opening reminded me a lot Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. What were your influences for the film, cinematic or otherwise?

You’re only the second person to compare the opening to Jeanne Dielman! That makes me so happy. Yeah, I am really influenced by Kubrick and especially The Shining (with A Clockwork Orange coming in second as far as how influential Kubrick has been to me) but I really wanted to make a film that felt like the formalist films of the sixties and seventies, so I’d have to cite Ingmar Bergman’s Persona as a major influence, down to the repeated scenes. Formalism aside, I was also influenced by Picnic at Hanging Rockwhich I feel is, for all intents and purposes, a supernatural horror film. In a cheeky way, I was hoping to echo the character aesthetic of Hanging Rock by putting Emily in Victorian garb but giving her a 70’s hairdo. And as far as the dialogue driven “less-is-more” approach, I have to cite The Haunting as an influence. The Robert Wise original from 1963, not the Jan de Bont action remake. And for the second act of the film, that twenty-minute segment after first contact between Emily and Sylvia, I owe it all to Stan Brakhage. At one point, I even considered making the middle of the film silent so it really felt like a Brakhage film, but I slapped myself and said “that’s not bold, that’s pretentious.” That and I would be getting rid of all of the sound design that was baked into the script and story.

You have a lot of credits to your name on this film including: Director, writer, producer, editor, score, cinematography and special effects (just to name a few). Do you prefer having that much independence and control with the production?

I actually do love how many hats I wore to make this film. My first film, Fruit Fly, was a little more adherent to the standards of institutional filmmaking, and it needed that. But I Am a Ghost was a chance for me to sort of empty my head onto the screen. It was a very personal shoot with me and Mark Del Lima behind the camera, Anna Ishida, Jeannie Barroga and Rick Burkhardt in front, and Diana Tenes and Juliet Heller off to the sides. And for a couple of days, L.A. Renigen, the lead actress from Fruit Fly, came up to San Francisco to line produce. It may be the last time I have complete control of a production, and that’s O.K., really. For all I know, it might be a good thing.

You’ve said in other interviews that the house in the film is actually a very friendly-looking bed and breakfast in San Francisco. Did you look at other locations before deciding on this specific place? How much did you do in terms of set design, lighting, etc. to make the house look more ominous?

Mark Del Lima and I had toyed with the idea of shooting in an old Victorian on the east coast, specifically Maine. I really wanted an isolated house with lots of space on the sides. Why? I don’t really know for sure. It just felt right. And I figured that if I wrote it into the screenplay, it would be an official requirement. But what I didn’t realize was how hard it would be to deal with a real old house, having to deal with rickety floors or dangerous attics. Mark suggested The Inn San Francisco to me and I was a little skeptical, truth be told. It’s so warm and friendly and well-lit. Mark told me that he could make props that would “creepify” the rooms. And as far as the ominous look goes, there’s a lot to be said about blaring a single strong light through a window and replacing all of the lamps with low-wattage bulbs.  We only had seven shooting days, so we often had to shoot “night-for-day”, simulating sunlight however we could. I laugh at one scene where Emily says “But I can see sunlight streaming in through the windows” and Sylvia responds with “That’s not real.” That’s right, Sylvia. It most definitely wasn’t.

Here’s a picture from my Instagram feed of the difference between the real look of the place and the lit version for the movie.

http://instagram.com/p/THhqtvNSxI/

Since the film really has only two main characters, with one of them being a disembodied voice, was the casting process difficult in terms of finding the right actresses to play Emily and Sylvia?

I stalked Anna for a while, hoping that she would be available to play Emily. I’d seen her in various plays and she always ends up being the actor who gives me chills. She has an amazing voice and an electrifying presence, so I was hoping to get her to read the screenplay at some point. As it turned out, she’d seen Fruit Fly and really wanted to work with me so we worked hard to find out how much time we had with each other before we both got swallowed up by our own lives and we found seven shooting days in which we could shoot.

As for Sylvia, I always wanted to work with Jeannie Barroga, who I only knew as an established Filipino-American playwright. When I met her in 2006 at a screening of Colma: The Musical, she introduced herself to me and told me that she liked my work. When I heard her voice, I knew I’d have to follow up with her for something in the future, maybe even Fruit Fly. We promised each other that we’d work with each other one day. And “one day” happened. We talked on the phone about psychics, ghosts in the Philippines, Sylvia Brown, and a bunch of other supernatural stuff and we settled it. We were going to work with each other.

Part of your funding for the film came from Kickstarter. As an independent filmmaker do you think it’s easier to make films now as opposed to years ago when options like crowdsourcing weren’t available?

I do think it’s easier to make a film now because of the major leaps in technology over the past seven years and especially because of crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter. I raised money via Kickstarter for post-production, but I Am a Ghost was already pretty low-budget. I’d look at the other filmmakers raising hundreds of thousands of dollars on Kickstarter and think “wow, they’re all in a different circle. I’m still just a guy who pays rent. Even in the crowdfunding world, I’m a small fish.” The new hardship is in visibility. With the amount of new media being produced, you have huge amounts of money being thrown at internet memes on one end of the continuum and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel on the other. Which eeks out what Dave Boyle calls “the middle class of filmmaker”. How do you pierce through this total noise? How do you get past the gatekeepers? Do you become a gatekeeper? It’s an exciting time for independent film, but it’s also really scary and it leaves a lot of us wondering how sustainable it all is.

Finally, what’s the current status on I Am a Ghost’s possibility for release, and what are you working on next? 

I Am a Ghost is finally done and is wrapping up the festival circuit. I don’t know what I’m going to do just yet, as far as distribution goes. I’m normally an “aw shucks, this old thing?” kinda guy when it comes to pushing my work, but we’ve won Best Film awards, as well as Best Actress and Best Director awards on top of being put on a bunch of Best of 2012 lists, so I’ve been shameless about pushing I Am a Ghost to distributors. I’ve also been talking with a lot of filmmakers about what they’re doing and I’m getting really inspired. Really inspired. I hope to post an update on the website within the next few months.

I’m setting a deadline to make my decision soon if I have any intention of shooting my new violent family comedy this year. It’s called Bitter Melon. You know those Christmas comedies where the whole family reunites for one evening and “hilarity ensues”? The hilarity in question, here, is that the whole family is reuniting to murder the black sheep of the family. It might be autobiographical.

I had a lot of memorable experiences at this year’s SF Indiefest, but the screening of director Paul Bunnell’s The Ghastly Love of Johnny X has to be right up at the top of the list. I was greeted at the box office by a camera crew (which I would later learn was shooting a piece for CBS) and Bunnell himself, who was full of enthusiasm and excitement about introducing the film to fresh eyes. The movie was presented in 35mm, and there were some projection issues in the middle of the film (the image completely blacked out at one point), but these technical hiccups only served to make the night more unforgettable. It reminded me that I was watching film, not a plastic disc. I’ll take imperfection over sterility every time.

Read our review of The Ghastly Love of Johnny X

Mr. Bunnell was generous enough to give Way Too Indie an interview about his wacky sci-fi adventure. He offers insight into the history of the film, his filmmaking process, his inspirations, the benefits of shooting on film, and much more.

The Ghastly Love of Johnny X is one of the strangest, scatterbrained films you’d have the pleasure of watching this year, and even Bunnell, the creator of the erratic comedy, had trouble summing it up into a sound bite.

“You can’t really put it into one sentence, but I’d say it’s about a gang of juvenile delinquents from outer space…and their gang leader (Johnny X) gets sentenced to planet earth for general mischievousness until Johnny can do a good deed. You know, I’ll tell you, it’s so crazy, it’s hard to really sum up into a sentence. I’d like to call it the only sci-fi/horror/comedy/intergalactic/weird movie you need to see this year…I don’t know, it’s just kind of a strange film. Good luck trying to sum it up! I usually say ‘The movie’s 106 minutes. Just come on in, go with it, and don’t have any expectations. It is what it is, (so just) go along for the ride and have a good time.”

Johnny X is full of greasers, classic cars, and soda shops, indicating influences from 50s and 60s culture and cinema. While Bunnell set out to make a nostalgic film, he was careful to not veer into ‘spoof’ territory.

“I was influenced by movies…from the 50’s and 60’s. A lot of the juvenile delinquent, teenage angst type films…like The Wild One with Marlon Brando to East of Eden (with) James Dean, to sci-fi films like Teenagers From Outer Space. Genre stuff like The Good the Bad and the Ugly. I wasn’t trying to make one of those films necessarily; I just wanted the look and feel of (them.)”

Initially, what surprised me about the film were its atypically high production values (the posters make it look like a B-movie.) Bunnell discusses the importance of making the film look as polished as possible.

“I didn’t want to compromise on the quality (of the film), which is why I had to wait to get the movie finished. A lot of friends said ‘Hey, you shot part of the film, why don’t you just go ahead and finish it up as a short film, shoot it (digitally), or make some kind of director’s reel out of it’, but I really didn’t want to do that. I knew I had to go for broke. I took the extra time and headache(s) to get (the film) looking, feeling, and sounding like a bigger movie, something contemporary. I felt like if I wasn’t going to do that, then what’s the point? I think audiences today expect a movie to be well done. They can certainly smell a cheap movie.”

It was truly a joy to watch such a retro-stylized movie projected in 35mm in the historic Roxie Theater. The flicker and life only film can achieve made this screening one of the purest movie-going experiences I’ve had in a while. Bunnell described the significance of film to his work.

“When I was a kid, I started out shooting on super 8 film…graduated to 16mm, and (Johnny X) was my first 35mm production. When I was a kid, 35mm was the thing to do. During the making of (Johnny X), everything started shifting over to digital, but I still wanted to finish it on film because I feel that film delivers something (organic) that you still cannot quite replicate (digitally.) The bottom line for me is the story. If you’ve got a good story, it doesn’t really matter what you shoot it on.”

Alfred Hitchcock mourned the silent film era when the first ‘talkies’ began to overrun cinemas in the 1920s. I asked Mr. Bunnell if he felt the same sadness for the passing of the film era into the digital era.

“I do (mourn the film age.) I’m so used to seeing (film) and what it looks like. (Film) is a really magical medium. It’s an over 100-year-old process. When (you’re) working with film, you have to be very, very careful about what you’re shooting, how you shoot it. (Everything has to be) very thought-out, and the plan has to be in place. With digital, you can roll and roll and roll, and you don’t have to worry about it. Well, we’re burning up film here! It really takes discipline. With digital cinema, there’s a lack of discipline with some filmmakers, because I don’t think they know (discipline.) When I’m shooting, I know exactly what I want to do. I get my angles, my shots, I rehearse the scenes, because (I) don’t have a lot of time or money to burn. It’s a technique that is going away with younger filmmakers.

There’s something about getting film exposed, taking it to the lab, developing it, then watching it when it’s projected…there’s something magical (about that experience) for me.”

Bunnell discusses these topics and much more, like the 10 year process of making Johnny X, his talented cast, how a carbon arc projector works, his choice to film on the now extinct Kodak Plus-X film stock, and much more in the full interview, which you can listen to in its entirety below.

Isaac Show from Later Babes (review) talks about the newly formed DJ group that derived from his previous band (We All Have Hooks for Hands) and Soulcrate. We discuss how the group formed and how they nearly went by the name Mars Travolta instead of Later Babes. Also, we find out what food they would eat if they were trapped on an island.

How did Later Babes form out of We All Have Hooks for Hands and Soulcrate?
I (Isaac) just started making a mix for no reason in my basement, and then it caught a couple ears in Soulcrate, and we decided it needed to be played live. So with a lot of input from them (Soulcrate) and us (Hooks), we made it happen.

Where did the name, Later Babes, come from?
Myles had a drawer full of names, and we picked it out of a hat.

What were some of the other names in that hat?
Baby Snakes, Mars Travolta, Alabamarama, and Hiya Pals to name a few.

What made you decide to give away the album Lisa and do you plan on ever selling music under the band Later Babes?
We don’t own any of the music, so it has to be free. We will probably never sell you music, but we will sell you a T-shirt or 2.

You are shipping out free CD’s to anyone that provides you with their address, how many do you think you have sent out so far?
We still are, and I dont think we plan on stopping. We have shipped out close to 500 copies, and given away more than 1000.

What is the most difficult transition from mixing at home to playing live?
At home, no one can see you. And when we make this mix, we are very conscious of the fact that people will have to play with this live.

When you guys play live there is a keyboardist and drummer, do any of the tracks feature either of these on Lisa or just live?
There are added keyboard parts added, and few drums scattered here and there.

Can you describe your process of creating a mash-up song and how do you decide which songs to use?
Basically, create a pool of songs that we all like, and start at a certain tempo, and put as much of it together as you can. The key is to have more than you need. I think we used about 10% of the songs that were submitted by us all. In the future, we might take submissions from fans.

So I have to ask…what is up with all the cats?
Internet phenomenons. We are pretty much an internet band, so we need to follow internet trends. Cats, pizza, Doritos and maybe boobs next.

Who do you get your inspiration from?
From my friends, and growing up going to parties, and dancing to sweet indie jams in our living room.

Are you guys planning on ever going on tour or is this more of just side project for now?
Hooks is ending very soon (July 20th at the orphuem) and we have been scheduling a few out of town shows, to see if we can play to people who dont know who Hooks or Soulcrate is. So yes, it has been talked about.

Are there any plans on doing any follow-up albums to Lisa?
Working on it as we speak.

If you were trapped on an island and could only eat tacos or pizzas, which would it be?
Doritos Late Night Tacos, and Doritos Pizza Supreme. So Doritos it is. (pizza)

]]> http://waytooindie.com/interview/interview-isaac-show-later-babes/feed/ 0 http://waytooindie.com/interview/interview-patrick-wang-in-the-family/ http://waytooindie.com/interview/interview-patrick-wang-in-the-family/#respond Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=3415 Patrick Wang was the writer, director, lead actor, and even self-releasing his film, In the Family, which he received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination for. He talks about the adjustments he had to make from his theatre background to film and why he decided to keep the score of the film to a minimum. ]]>

Patrick Wang was the writer, director, lead actor, and even self-releasing his film, In the Family (review), which he received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination for. He talks about the adjustments he had to make from his theatre background to film and why he decided to keep the score of the film to a minimum.

So I have read why you decided to have it set in Martin, TN but why did you decide to shoot in Yonkers, NY?
That’s a great question, and in the future I look forward to shooting in many different parts of the country. But this was my first film, and New York is home now. With all the new challenges that would be coming my way, I thought it would be a good idea to be able to come home to someplace familiar at the end of the day and be close to my support system of friends. Yonkers is close to New York, is similar in climate to Martin, and parts look very much like Martin. It also has another connection to the movie: Chip Taylor is from Yonkers.

It seems like you would have had to know Chip Taylor was going to be a part of the film from the beginning, since one of the characters was named after him, is this true?
I had written Chip Taylor into the script but not so deeply that we couldn’t change things if he didn’t like the project. I sent him the script to read, and fortunately he liked it. He has been a great friend to the movie and to me.

Speaking the score, In the Family remains largely absent of one, what was the reason for this?
One of our audience members made the beautiful observation, “Some movies make you think, this one lets you think.” I tried to combine a strong visual perspective for observing the scene with neutral perspective on interpreting the scene. The deep focus allows your eye to follow many different paths through the scene, and the lack of score lets your emotions follow many different paths through the scene. While riskier, the result can be a much more personal and unpredictable experience.

Because there was many single-take long scenes which sometimes involving a child actor, how were you able to keep him focused throughout the scene? Was it a constant struggle?
The most challenging scene with Sebastian was the long take for the opening kitchen scene. He has a lot of lines; he’s moving around and handing a lot of props at the same time. But honestly, it was a challenging scene for all of us. I had a line flub in one of the takes, and I barely had any lines in the scene. Sebastian is extremely focused as it is for a six year old, but when he needed some help, I’d try to make a game out of the scene and give him something new to do.

It took only three weeks to shoot the film but approximately how much did it cost to make In the Family?
It was just under half a million. A significant amount of that was for the filmout and making 35mm prints for a 169 minute movie.

The film was rejected from several film festivals before finally being accepted into some, do you think the run-time was the biggest culprit?
Your guess is as good as mine. We have only heard back from one of the festivals very recently. They apologized and acknowledged they had only watched the first few minutes of the film.

You are going to be self-releasing the film this spring, what do you believe is the toughest hurdle to getting picked up?
Each film has its different hurdles, and with this film, I feel the biggest hurdle is that I am facing a distribution industry that has adopted risk minimization as its behavioral norm. Not risk optimization, risk minimization. In the short run, this lets you grasp at the disappearing pie. In the long run, it kills innovation and future commerce.

Any interesting fact you can share about the film that a viewer would not know from just watching the film?
Even though they get cut up in the final edit, the two wide shots in the deposition scene were shot as single takes of the entire scene, each take over half an hour long. I remember how exciting the first take was. Everyone thought we would cut at some point, but we did the whole damn thing.

What influences from your theatre experience transferred to this film? What was the most difficult adjustment for you?
From theater, I get my love of performance and literature. I also learned from working with designers in theater how to see and listen. That’s most of what I needed to make this film. I think the most challenging adjustment I found in moving from theater to film is that the environment on a film set can be very distracting to the actors’ work. My AD and I worked hard to find ways to make the set culture more performance-friendly.

Do you have any future projects in the works?
Yes, I’m working on writing a screenplay based on Leah Hager Cohen’s novel “The Grief of Others.” It’s a gorgeous novel, and I’m looking forward to figuring out how film can try to keep up with the density and dexterity of a novel.

Sean Parker and Austin Hillebrecht both directed the super low budget film Coup de Cinema (review), which is an indie comedy about indie filmmaking. They explain the importance of pre-production, the pros and cons of co-directing, and their take on the fundraising website Kickstarter.

I think the concept behind Coup de Cinema is very creative, how was the idea born?
Sean: A dream, actually! Several years ago I had a pretty memorable dream about being an extra on the set of a really awful sci-fi movie, and convincing the crew to let me take over and make it better. That basic concept of having a nobody take over a film production sounded like a fun premise, so we added a heist element to the story and got Coup de Cinema.

The characters are all pretty genuine, especially the director Adrian, did any of the material come from real life experiences?
Austin: Not entirely. Most of the characters were spawned from ideas for different character quirks that would be funny. Though Daniel is the one I can closely relate to because of my two years in school for 3D animation. By the end of it, you kind of turn into someone like Daniel: apathetic, cynical, and too overworked to care anymore.
Sean: Going into the project we didn’t really have many real-life experiences in film to pull from. There was a lot of speculation about kinds of people we would and wouldn’t like to work with that influenced our character ideas, and we tried to keep it fairly down to earth most of the time. The actors added quite a lot of personality to the characters we weren’t anticipating, which worked really nicely.

Did you film entirely in Portland and how many days did you spend filming?
Sean: Just about. We had three days in Olympia and a couple shoots in small towns nearby. The rest was all Portland — about 30 shoot days spread over four months.

Approximately how much did it cost to make Coup de Cinema?
Sean: Around $15,000. Almost half was spent on audio — hiring boom operators, getting an intensive sound mix, some equipment purchases — and the rest went toward feeding the crew, hiring a couple special effects artists, and the usual indie film miscellany.

You guys used Kickstarter.com to fund much of the costs of production, how important was that for the film and would you do it again?
Austin: It was really important. But I don’t know if I would do it again. It seems the Kickstarter market is a little swamped and overused nowadays. Then again, it is an easy way for people you know to donate money.

I read recently that Kickstarter is really changing the way movies are made, do you agree with that?
Austin: It kinda makes the competition to get your project funded a little harder I think. Though most of the people who donate are people you already know, but there are a lot of people doing Kickstarter projects these days. I think you get a little jaded by all of them after a while.

Sean: The market has definitely exploded in volume since we used it, which is great, but can certainly make it hard for a project to be noticed amongst the sea. Now more than ever, I think unless your project is something that really gets people talking, you can’t expect to raise much money from strangers. But if you have a great concept, have true passion for film and a proven ability to pull it off, Kickstarter is a place where you have the chance to see dream projects get financed in a way that that simply could not have happened several years ago. It’s a little in its infancy to determine if Kickstarter will be a true game changer, but it’s certainly a breath of fresh air for indie film financing.

You do not see many films with two directors, were there times when it did more harm than good?
Austin: There were times for me when it was a little frustrating. We agreed on most things but there were times when our visions didn’t completely mesh. Sean seemed to quickly adapt to the mindset of knowing what was possible with the budget, time, and resources available to us. It took a little longer for me, and that’s where the frustration was. But we did manage to be one brain the whole time. I think Sean and me balance each other out well when we work together.

Sean: It helps that we’ve known each other for over 10 years now. I’ve got a really odd sense of humor that certainly wouldn’t be as rampant as it is if we hadn’t met, and it wasn’t until a few months after meeting that our enthusiasm for filmmaking really took off. So everything we’ve learned so far about film, comedy, storytelling — we’ve more or less learned side by side.

Austin: We’re used to bouncing ideas off each other so that’s kind of how the direction went. Sean would tell the actor to do something, then I might add to the idea, and then him, and by the end, the actor might end up a little swamped with direction and motivation.

Sean: Which often led to some hilarious results that were too bizarre to use in the final cut, but certainly kept the mood lively and fun.

One of the directors, Austin Hillebrecht, was the lead actor but how were the other cast members selected?
Austin: Magic and necromancy.

Sean: But mostly craigslist.

Any interesting tidbit you can share with us about film?
Sean: The first weekend of shooting was a nightmarish wake-up call for me. It was our only out-of-state shoot, three days in a row with over 30 people involved, and we’d never done anything remotely close to that size of production before… for some reason we decided to get the hardest shoot done first. We had very optimistic and naive assumptions about how much we could get done every day, and we ran into some serious problems with a couple people, hard-hitting financial mishaps and a brutal experience at the equipment loan which threatened to derail the proceedings. We lost our production manager a few days before the shoot so I took on all those duties in addition to directing and camerawork, which would be easy on a small project but was absolutely terrifying and overwhelming on this one. It got to a point where after the weekend wrapped, completely behind schedule, I didn’t think I could make it through the 30-odd days of shooting ahead of us and was completely devastated. Several days later I sat down with Austin and told him my concerns, expecting the movie to be doomed… and was surprised to hear him totally confused why I felt that way — to him everything seemed fine. I was a little wary but decided to press on because of his confidence. It wasn’t until after we finished filming, several months later, that I talked to him again about how worried I was that first weekend, and it turned out he wasn’t even aware of the problems we had! I was probably too stressed out to relay all the horror stories. Had he known about them, he probably would’ve felt like I did and who knows what would have happened to the film. So that was a pretty harrowing experience that ended up being hilarious in retrospect.

You said the film is most likely going to be self-distributed, what do you think is the biggest hurdle to get picked up?
Austin: I think it’s the fact that not all of it is as polished as we would like it to be. And there’s nothing else we can do to fix it. I feel like that might make distributors a little wary of picking it up. But then again, what do I know? I’ve never had a film I’ve made picked up by a distributor so I don’t know how the process goes.

Sean: A big lesson we’ve learned here is the importance of pre-production. Most of our problems with the production values could have been averted if we’d locked down our locations further in advance, had a solid shoot schedule and a much, much bigger art department budget — all things we could have taken care of if we’d mapped out production a bit better. I was actually in my final year of college when we filmed this, using Coup de Cinema as an excuse to get my film credit (rather than taking any more experimental film classes), and I kinda rushed us into production so we could wrap before I graduated. We got lucky that things didn’t fall apart this time. Even though there’s a lot of areas of the film where I wish we had more time & resources, I’m really proud of what we accomplished. I hope for the best, but I look at the film more as a learning experience than a big break. If the film doesn’t get distributed, but helps pave the way for a bigger and better film in a couple years, I’ll be beyond happy.

Also do you think the fact the film is sort of a satire on smaller indie studios had anything to do with it?
Austin: I think if they have a problem with it, then they missed the point of the movie.

How did you get into film, did you go to film school?
Austin: No film school for me. But I did study 3D animation at Lifeway College in New Zealand for two years. The rest of my film knowledge is from making movies over the past 11 years.

Sean: I spent four years at The Evergreen State College focusing on film, but I was already gung-ho about making movies — I had taken some weekend animation workshops when I was 9 or 10 and got hooked. When Austin and I met in middle school we had a wonderful teacher who got us into shooting digital, taught us basic editing and that opened up an entire world for us.

[spoiler start]
I was completely fine with Miles not getting Caitlyn in the end, but was the main point of having her in the script to show character progression in Miles?
Sean: One of the film’s messages is that if you’re going to do something big — to risk everything and put more than just yourself on the line — you really ought to have your heart in the right place. Miles wants to be with Caitlyn, and tries to use his quest to fix the movie as a means to that end. So having Caitlyn in the story was our attempt at showing a clear progression in Miles’ attitude toward love and filmmaking, as he gets corrupted by his ulterior motives and ultimately has to let them go.
[spoiler end]

My scene in the film was when they are shooting in the evergreen forest, what is your favorite scene from the film?
Austin: I really liked the forest scene too. I related to that situation a lot. I also really like the bad movie montage and pretty much any time it shows Ren Fields crazy edits. I can’t get enough of those.

Sean: It’s funny, looking back after we’d finished filming (but before we started screening it) I’d thought the forest scene was a little unnecessary and wished we could find a way to work around it, since it doesn’t really advance the story and it mainly just reinforces that the director is an idiot, which should already be apparent. Turns out it’s the scene that always gets some of the biggest laughs at every showing. Shows what I know!

Do you guys have any other projects in the works?
Austin: Not really. Just ideas.

Sean: But a few of those ideas have been pretty fleshed-out. We’re not jumping into anything just yet though. I want to see where Coup de Cinema brings us before committing to the next big collaboration, so we have time to recover and see if we’re able to step up our budget. We’re also rather prone to whims and unpredictable turns of interest, so who knows if we might come up with some shorts or web video in the interim. If I’m sure of anything, it’s that we’re in this for the long haul. If we’ve a lifetime of filmmaking ahead of us, I’m in no hurry.

]]> http://waytooindie.com/interview/intereview-sean-parker-austin-hillebrecht-coup-de-cinema/feed/ 0 http://waytooindie.com/interview/interview-jason-brown-nightfur/ http://waytooindie.com/interview/interview-jason-brown-nightfur/#respond Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=1477 Jason Brown sheds some light behind his quirky indie film, Nightfur, which he wrote and directed. Not only does he tell us how he got the drummer from “Band of Horses” to act in his film but also how they may be rich next time they go back to North Carolina.]]>

Jason Brown sheds some light behind his quirky indie film, Nightfur (review), which he wrote and directed. Not only does he tell us how he got the drummer from “Band of Horses” to act in his film but also how they may be rich next time they go back to North Carolina.

Nightfur has a pretty unique premise, where did the idea for the film come from?
We wanted to create a movie that reflected the mystery of existence both symbolically and stylistically. I am fascinated by the fact that so much is unknown about our existence in the grand scheme of things. When developing the screenplay, I knew that I wanted to offer viewers something different. I found that, for this project, I was more inspired as a director to explore a New Wave road rather than follow more traditional methods of storytelling. I suppose that is a major freedom and advantage when creating an ultra low budget feature. The idea for the film came from some of my favorite topics; science & technology versus nature, physical versus metaphysical, order versus anarchy. I created the characters to represent these types of opposites and was interested in seeing how they interacted when presented with an unexplained phenomenon. In life, things “just happen” and we adjust organically to them. To me, Nightfur is shrouded in mystery – in more ways than one. This is reflective of our existence. Much like a flashlight in a dark room. Ok, enough of this artsy talk!

How many days did you spend filming?
9 Days.

Because Nightfur was made on an indie budget, what was the biggest challenge in terms of lack of money?
We had to cut a lot of corners – in fact we may have cut all the corners, resulting in a round movie. A key goal in my mind was to complete the picture — no matter what. Jeter and I made hefty sacrifices all along the way in order to bring the project to completion. It was very much like origami in the sense of not knowing exactly how it would all appear in its final form. The biggest sacrifice was having to squeeze the entire shoot into 9 days. It was necessary to complete in that time frame due to many other aspects of corner cutting. More time would have have allowed more careful execution of scenes, but would have been beyond our means. We moved incredibly fast. It was very much like driving with a blindfold on, which I suppose was an ultimate test of artistic instinct. Our shooting schedule was rock solid, designed to be as lean and as fast as possible. Luckily, when unforseen events derailed our schedule, we were able to swap scenes and days without losing too much. Even after all of the sacrifices, I feel that we were lucky to be able to create the film from a fine art stand point rather than having commercial confines. It goes without saying that theatrical sale of any picture relies heavily on actor fan base or media hype, which is a luxury this type of film seldom sees. With a larger budget, you can put together a more enticing package for buyers.

Do you have a favorite scene from the film?
My favorite scene, I’d have to say, is the interior of the attic when Helen pays frank a visit and they discuss Judy and the Zither. It is simple, but beautiful to me. Being shot late in our shoot, I feel that the scene captures a moment when those two actors were in their best frame of mind – truly becoming the characters and, for a moment, putting aside the of tough times we were having behind the scenes.

Describe the casting process for this film.
We put out casting notices in several publications, but ultimately found our actors from a pool of friends as opposed to casting sessions. My producing partner, Jeter, turned out to be a perfect fit for Frank as he already knew the character better than anyone. Jana saved the day by stepping in as Helen when our first actor had a baby and became unavailable for the role. Creighton joined the production as John Moon by way of our Producer, Jeter. He was perfect for the role and went above and beyond by helping build the Dr. Roberts lab set! He was a huge help and inspiration all along the way. We spoke with local theater groups and schools to find the smaller roles in the film.

Band of Horses are a pretty big indie band, how did you not only get to use them as part of your soundtrack, but act in your film?
Jeter is an old friend of Creighton’s and recalled that he expressed an interest in being part of a film. He had the perfect personality and look for the recluse character of John Moon. The fact that he was in Band Of Horses was secondary, but their music was on our wish list. We lucked out that the band was into the vibe of the film and wanted to be a part of the soundtrack. Creighton is by far one of the best team players I’ve ever worked with. He was truly dedicated to the role and we couldn’t have done it without him. I am very inspired by all of the music in our film and feel that it compliments the themes and visuals perfectly. We had some amazing groups involved with the music; The Parson Redheads, The Stevenson Ranch Davidians, Lucy Langlas, and Black Nile.

Any interesting tidbits you can share with us about film?
We were chased off of someone’s land by shotgun. Our van almost slid into a 20 foot ravine, but we were able to drag the vehicle out by chains. I had to shoot the film myself after our DP backed out one week before the shoot. We discovered GOLD deep in North Carolina and plan to go back to mine it someday. The generator almost exploded and started shooting out blue flames. The camera was smashed to the ground when the jib arm was left unattended – we had to use gaff tape to secure the camera for the rest of the shoot. It was nine days of non-stop “rolling with the punches”, but we were determined to get the movie finished. We truly were in the trenches of filmmaking.

How did you get into film, did you go to film school?
I attended NCSA (North Carolina School Of The Arts) and met Jeter while studying directing around 1999. I soon began a career in Los Angeles working on major studio films. Most recently Tron: Legacy and Captain America. A world where a single concept design could feasibly cost more than the entire budget of Nightfur. I feel lucky to have worked for and learned from some of my childhood behind-the-scenes heroes.

Tell me about the advertising process and how successful you think getting your film out there is.
We are in negotiations with a major distributor right now. Over the past few months I have been self distributing in support of indie video stores though my own company. Being a very D.I.Y. project, we have extremely limited advertising capabilities but have been doing the best we can via the internet and industry connections. Only time will tell how successful our efforts will be.

What film directors do you look up to the most?
Fellini, Spielberg, Hughes, Hitchcock, Cohen Brothers, Zemeckis, and many more!

Who came first, the band or the film and how did you decide on the name?
The film came first. I have always played music and was forming a new project at the time. We didn’t have a name and everyone seemed to like “Nightfur” for the imagery it created. I thought it would be fun to try and make both projects reflect each other and have common stylistic traits.

Do you have any other projects in the works?
Yes, many! I am working on my next feature film which will take things to a whole new and exciting level.

]]> http://waytooindie.com/interview/interview-jason-brown-nightfur/feed/ 0 http://waytooindie.com/interview/interview-aaron-godfred-little-blue-pill/ http://waytooindie.com/interview/interview-aaron-godfred-little-blue-pill/#comments Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=1309 Aaron Godfred directed his first feature film called Little Blue Pill and was kind enough to answer some questions about his indie comedy film. He shares his woes on microbudgeting, the state of California and Ford Motor Company.]]>

Aaron Godfred directed his first feature film called Little Blue Pill (review) and was kind enough to answer some questions about his indie comedy film. He shares his woes on microbudgeting, the state of California and Ford Motor Company.

How did you come up with the idea for Little Blue Pill? I hope not from personal experience.
I was at my best friend’s wedding a couple years ago and the night before, we were sitting in a barn in New Hampshire, drinking wine and telling stories. A friend told me a story about a friend of a friend who accidentally took two Viagra and had a boner for a day. I wrote this on a napkin or coaster and put it in my pocket. I really wish I could find that damn piece of paper. It would be worth millions by now.

Approximately how much did it cost to make Little Blue Pill?
We’re at $86,000 and counting. One thing that I’ve learned is on microbudget films you can’t really budget for some items or you’ll put a zero in for color correction and then end up hiring someone to do it because you just can’t do a good job on your own. Also, the greedy state of California requires an $800 annual LLC fee so even though at this point we haven’t made a cent we’ve now paid the state over $2,400. The LLC was pretty necessary though in case we offended Pfizer or someone got hurt on our set. But every year when I have to write that check I want to call the Governator and tell him off. Having an indie film is like a baby. It’s always in need of something and that something has a price tag associated with it.

Considering it was on an indie budget, what was the biggest challenge in terms of lack of money?
Hmm… the biggest challenge was having to get everything for a fraction of what the productions we were competing with for crew and equipment could afford to pay. There are literally thousands of negotiations during the pre, production and post phases and we really needed people who wanted to be partners with us and weren’t in it for the big $$$. We had to cut a lot of corners but do it in a way that someone watching the movie back home wouldn’t have a clue.

How much of the film was shot in Portland and how many days did you spend filming?
Almost everything that took place outside of the Phalitech interior was shot in Portland. We filmed for three six-day weeks in Portland and a fourth week in Renton, Washington at a surgical training facility that served as Phalitech. We also had two days of pickups in Los Angeles where we filmed at my grandma’s house and my director of photography’s apartment in Silverlake.

The cast seemed perfectly chosen but obviously none are household names (yet), tell me how you did the casting process for this film.
Thanks. I absolutely love all of the actors in LBP. The lead roles were cast from www.lacasting.com which is a fantastic, fantastic website for casting in Southern California. We held auditions at my grandma’s house and then got together and watched the tapes over and over laughing our asses off. The lead actor Aaron Kuban was chosen because every time we saw him audition with the car scene we were rolling around on the floor laughing. Someday I’m going to put that in the DVD extras. The same is said for Adam Carr who plays Oscar.

The supporting roles were all local Portland actors. Jake Rossman, a fraternity brother of mine who lives in Portland acted as our casting director up there and set up a bunch of auditions. I also attended the PATA, Portland Area Theater Alliance, open audition and found a couple more actors there. Portland has a terrific theater community and an emerging film and television scene. I was so happy and honored to get the amazing cast that I did.

Any interesting tidbit you can share with us about the film?
Portland was an amazing place to film because the city was so friendly to filmmaking and the permitting process was efficient and affordable. We all stayed in a dormitory at a local university and one morning at 6am my producer and roommate, Dave Szamet, gets a call from our traffic flagger asking if he’s at the right location for the day’s filming. He was confused because there were shitloads of production vehicles there and he thought we were a small production. We in fact were a small production with one 3-ton grip truck we nicknamed Shitty Frank.

Dave and I rushed to the location to find out they were shooting a Ford commercial the following day and even though we had permitted the intersection we neglected to permit or purchase the sidewalks and parking. The location manager for Ford made it very clear that their twenty trucks were not going anywhere. At this point, I was freaking out so Dave called our contact at the city film office and he told us to just pick another intersection and shoot. We ended up finding a better one with a train crossing rather than a stop sign and in the end it made the scene that much better. The production value you get from a train in your film is pretty awesome.

How did you get into film?
I started making snowboard videos in Alaska, where I grew up. I went to Best Buy and bought a sweet Sony MiniDV camera, which I still have today, and a fish eye lens. Although I majored in International Business and have an MBA, I never stopped filming stuff. After a year as a consultant in Connecticut, I packed it up and moved to LA to pursue filmmaking full time. Rather than wait tables or bartend to support my filmmaking addiction I worked as a camera rental agent and later an assistant to some agents at William Morris Endeavor. They rep actors and filmmakers from Ben Affleck to Martin Scorsese and I believe Shaq as well. The agency is also what the agency in the HBO show Entourage is based off of. If you are familiar with the show, I was basically Lloyd. While I was there I wrote Little Blue Pill and after two years of going to work in a suit in Beverly Hills, I quit and put LBP in to pre-production.

Tell me about the advertising process and how successful you think getting your film out there is going.
We are partnered with a digital distributor called GoDigital Media Group. They are a bunch of really smart guys who understand the digital space. I’m primarily handling the marketing side of things. With no real budget we’ve had to get creative and social. Social networking has played a big part in creating awareness for the movie and keeping people posted about what’s going on with LBP. Check out our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/littlebluepill and become a fan. We also use Twitter and Youtube.

One of my big initiatives has been to reach out to indie film bloggers and people who support indie film like yourself and your site waytooindie.com. It’s people like you who really help to get the word out there to viewers who are passionate about indie film. Also, we’re working on some viral initiatives to try to reach a broader audience. The movie is being released on iTunes April 12th and is available for presale now so it’s time to get our marketing on. Honestly, I enjoy this part of the process because I can finally put some of the stuff I learned in 6 years of studying business and marketing to work.

What film directors do you look up to the most?
Martin Scorsese, Ben Affleck (after The Town), Todd Phillips, the Farrelly brothers from back in the day, the Cohen brothers, Gaspar Noe, Danny Boon, Don Coscarelli, Stanley Kubrick, David Fincher, Billy Wilder and Mel Brooks.

Considering this was your first feature film, do you have any other projects in the works?
Always. In this town you are only as good as your next movie. I’m putting the finishing touches on a workplace comedy that I’m writing. I also just wrapped production on a fantastically bizarre and interesting horror film called John Dies At The End, which was directed by Don Coscarelli. I was a co-producer on it. This movie is really going to trip people out and I’m so excited to watch it come together. I’m also working on a host of other projects and just trying to get one across the starting line.

Thanks for taking the time to do this interview and insight on independent filmmaking.
Thanks for speaking with me Dustin. I’m happy to share my knowledge of indie filmmaking and priapism (a potentially harmful and painful medical condition in which the erect penis does not return to its flaccid state.)

Little Blue Pill is being released on iTunes April 12th.