Lynn Shelton’s second feature, My Effortless Brilliance stars Sean Nelson of the band Harvey Danger (whose biggest hit, “Flagpole Sitta”, was memorialized in a ridiculously popular web clip last year) as Eric Lambert Jones, a novelist whose self-obsession costs him his relationship with his oldest friend. Struggling to recapture the success of his first book with his third, Eric takes a detour from a book tour to drop in on said friend’s cabin in the woods in an attempt to try to repair the friendship. Brilliance will be screening in the Narrative Competition at SXSW. Shelton’s last feature, We Go Way Back, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Slamdance Film Festival. By now, you know how this goes: trailer above, Shelton’s answers to the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody below.
Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.

My Effortless Brilliance is like My Dinner With Andre meets Deliverance. With a cougar thrown in for good measure.

It’s about narcissism, the crippling effects of success, the terror of failure, and, most all, the limitations of friendship.

I got the idea for making a film like My Effortless Brilliance while I was in production on my first narrative feature, We Go Way Back. That experience was truly eye-opening for me because it was my first time working on a traditional movie set. Although I’d been making films for over a decade, my educational background had been in photography and theater and I’d always approached filmmaking like a painter in a studio might–it was a totally solo experience. I had worked on other people’s narrative work, but always as an editor so I was totally unfamiliar with the culture and life of a film set.

And I loved it, I loved being on a real movie set, the busyness of it, the way that everyone worked together to form this gigantic functioning creative organism. Having creative collaborators was terrifying and liberating and astounding and it totally changed the way that I approached making art–it all became about relationships for me. Relationship-based filmmaking you could call it.

As life-changing and wonderful as the experience was however, I was frustrated by the way that traditional movie-making seemed almost custom-designed to obstruct the central work of the project–that of the actor. I immediately started fantasizing about trying to find a way of making films that would be as easy on the actors as possible–a completely performance-centered process: small unobtrusive crew, minimal eqiupment, 360˚ lighting, long takes. Plus, characters based on the actors themselves and words that would come straight out of the actors’ own brains: improvised lines.

My Effortless Brilliance started with my crush on Sean Nelson. I found him to be a really charismatic performer as well as a pretty compelling individual and I bet that he could carry a film. After he expressed an interest in working with me, I floated the idea of a character he could play (a novelist who’d had a brief, intense brush with fame) and a theme that we might explore (the limitations of platonic friendship). He went for both and that’s how the whole thing started. It was very organic after that. The story evolved out of the development of that character and the other characters that soon emerged. We needed a best friend for his character and ended up casting one of Sean’s actual friends, Basil Harris, with whom he already had an awesome rapport. The third actor, Calvin Reeder, was cast as someone who was as close to his polar opposite as possible.

I was self-producing on a VERY tiny budget so I also wrote the plot around resources that I had at my disposal, namely a location owned by family and friends in eastern Washington, about five hours outside of Seattle.

My movie-making is now more relation-based than ever. Since the crew is so tiny, the experience is totally intimate and I think everyone feels pretty valued and engaged on set. That’s my goal anyhow. You’ll have to ask them if they feel the same.

Do you have a day job/a non-filmmaking occupation that raises money for your filmmaking efforts? Tell us about it.

I’ve had the good fortune to be able to teach part time, for well over a decade now. I taught for a few years at the School of Visual Arts in New York and I’ve taught for the past seven years at the Art Institute of Seattle in their Digital Filmmaking and Video Production program. Teaching is awesome because it gets me out of my self-obsessed artist head and into the heads of other self-obsessed artists. Which is always fascinating and instructive.
Have you been to SXSW before? If so, tell us about your funniest story from the experience. If not, what are you looking forward to re: the festival and/or the city of Austin?

I’ve never been to SXSW nor Austin. I’ve heard amazing things about both and am extremely excited to be going.

Let’s get hypothetical: You’re on death row. The night of your execution, you’re allowed to watch any two films of your choice. What would you pick for your last-night-on-Earth double feature?

Spinal Tap and The World of Apu.