This interview was conducted at the Atlanta Film Festival in April. Trust Us, This is All Made Up screens at the 92nd St. Y in Tribeca on Friday and Saturday.

In the West Village’s Barrow Street Theater, three empty chairs sit on an otherwise empty stage. An audience gathers, chatters, sits to stay. It’s not notable really; in fact, it’s so much less than that it could be called pedestrian. Then a second thought occurs, which is, of course, “What exactly in moments will happen on this empty stage? Who will sit on these empty chairs?” That, then, is the mystery.

Somewhere in this audience, say toward stage right, sits filmmaker Alex Karpovsky. A friend clued him into coming to this improvisational show of veteran Chicago comedians T.J. Jagodowski and David Pasquesi. Karpovsky came, he admits, with some bit of hesitation: “At least back then I wasn’t a huge fan of improv; from what I’d seen, it just wasn’t for me.”

The show, however, an entirely improvised 50-minute stretch of narrative exploration, struck Karpovsky, its characters and story arc remaining with him for many days afterward. “It was made me wonder about the underpinnings of human creativity and human imagination,” he says. “It made me very curious about (T.J. and Dave’s) relationship toward one another, and it made me very interested in their relationship toward improv in general.”

Far from a rote live performance film, Karpovsky’s resulting doc Trust Us, This Is All Made Up tiptoes gracefully around universal issues involving artistic collaboration, faithfulness felt toward and trust in some greater meaning and fearless, open-minded storytelling. It’s a film that catches you slightly off-guard and leaves you there, tottering you lightly on the boundary of some greater truth, teasing you to discover not only the stories T.J. and Dave will tell but also your own story, which in the end remains as mysterious as do the purposes of those three empty chairs.

While traveling the film festival circuit this year, Karpovsky pulled time out of this schedule to speak about the challenges of editing live performance, the magic of character development and the unknowable “It” that writes a story yet unread.

One of the interesting points for me about this particular show is that when I think of traditional improv, I think of its much faster-paced form, I think of an immediate punchline, I think of a set-up and agreement. All of these tropes I had so well known, [T.J. and Dave] felt comfortable enough to shirk off. How, in watching the two work, did you redefine for yourself the limits of what improv is, can and should do?

Speaking on their behalf—and I could be wrong, I put that out as a preface—I feel that they don’t necessarily adhere very closely to what seem to be conventions of improv, but I think one of their fundamental beliefs is to pay attention and keep it interesting, keep the story moving. If you do those fundamentals, you find that the general principles are present. There’s no reason to consciously put those principles at the forefront; those are more or less byproducts of paying attention to the other person…So, yes, there is this rule, “And…always agree with your partner,” but sometimes T.J and Dave are not interested in that, and it’s okay for them not to be. A lot of times the most interesting stories come when the other person says, “No.” Then there’s conflict created, and they have to deal with that conflict.

Shooting with an eight camera set-up [led by cinematographer Ariel Boles] must have helped this along, but it occurred to me as difficult, taking an art form that depends in large part on live communication with an audience and translating it into a much more staid medium. In order to keep the story lively, what kind of editing process did you have to go through in order to maintain that energy?

That was the central challenge and central source of enthusiasm for me personally, that, “How do we translate this inherently and fundamentally 3D live theatrical experience into a 2D, flat cinematic experience?” T.J and Dave were very wary initially about this whole idea because they’ve seen this process fail many, many times, and so there was a lot of skepticism, and it was very warranted.

One of the things I felt would help any possible translation would be to set up a context before the show began, and that’s what I try to do in the first 18 minutes of the film, is to introduce the audience to the characters and the dynamic between them, to explore their dynamic in improvisation in general and at the same time to ratchet up the suspense and interest in the show itself. It also serves to sprinkle in a few points of interaction that, during (T.J. and Dave’s) daily wanderings, will resurrect within the performance itself.

The two movies that we talked about that have structural similarities to this are two live concert performance films—although arguably only one is really a live concert performance film. In Swimming to Cambodia–which is one of my favorite films in general—the film doesn’t begin with Spalding Gray talking in front of the theater; it begins with him walking around Manhattan, and this sets up a context for the audience to get ready for the show. I don’t even think Spalding Gray says much of anything, but this does somehow introduce you to this person before you know who this person is, before you know that he’s a really well-known and well-received monologue performer with a big following, before he embraces this confidence as a theatrical performer. The other film is My Dinner With Andre, which is basically one long conversation, but it doesn’t begin with the conversation; it begins with an approach to the restaurant to start the conversation. It’s just a good fifteen minutes of voice-over where Wallace Shawn introduces the audience to this man he’s about to have dinner with, and so by the time that the dinner actually begins, I’m so intrigued and mesmerized and curious about who this guy Andre Gregory is that I can’t wait for the show to begin. To some extent we were hoping to do some of those things with [Trust Us…], to create some of that suspense and intrigue so that the audience can’t wait for the show to begin, even if they don’t know what the show is about.

Another thing that we needed for the translation to work in terms of the actual performance was to have really good sound, not to have really theatrical, boomy distance sound. So both of them have wireless lavalieres.

Then for the editing, we needed as much diversity in points of perspective as possible. One of the points that I found most challenging during the edit of the show was that on the one hand I wanted the audience of the film to experience what the audience in the Barrow Street Theater experienced. I wanted them to feel like they were there in the room with the others who were really in the theater during the show. A lot of the angles were from that perspective, with the back of people’s heads in front of you. But, I also really wanted to show the close-ups because T.J. and Dave can throw each other the smallest gesture, know exactly what to do with those meanings and run really quickly and agilely right when the gesture is laid down. So that was a give-and-take between having a lot of perspective, having a lot of cutting going on but also trying to preserve the general notion of sitting in the theater.

Earlier you talked about the underpinnings of imagination and creativity. What does this particular show’s narrative development teach you about those two things?

[T.J. and Dave] play seven or eight different characters during the course of the show. To be able to remember all the idiosyncrasies that define this character, even before that character needs or has to speak during the show, is to me really impressive; just to be able to come up with that character very quickly, then to be able to give that character context and meaning within the scene, and then to give that character an arc that spans throughout the show and in some case reaches a crisis and/or delusion, and then to multiple that small miracle by seven, create a bunch of these characters, and then to be able to basically play chess with seven opponents at the same time, to basically juggle all of those characters in their minds, building these mnemonic devices as they go to remember who those characters are, and then on top of that to have both (T.J. and Dave) play those characters, and then to make sure that the audience understands what’s going on, for the audience to understand, “Oh, this is T.J.’s character, but Dave’s now playing him, and we haven’t even seen this character in 15 minutes,” to let the audience be aware of this language, this largely symbol language that’s developing between these characters, I think all of that requires an extraordinary amount of creativity, imagination and mental, cerebral dexterity and agility.

…I’m not only talking about the characters, it’s also the larger plot. These performances are basically one-act shows with a fully realized plot, in addition to the story being really, really funny most of the time. When you combine all of those factors and role them into one, it’s pretty impressive little casserole that they are able to do this every time they come on stage. It’s a remarkable feat, an outstanding feat. It requires a deep faith and trust in the other person, I think.

Among the big questions I left this film with, and this ties a bit into the last question, is the question as to whether or not people are inherently creative. There’s doubt as to firstly whether humans are inherently creative and then secondly, if there is creativity noted, as to its sustainability over long periods of time. What are your thoughts here?

It’s not really my place to talk about the nature of human creativity. Generally, and this might sound a little silly, I think we are all equally creative; I do. It’s most applicable to this film and our discussion in that I don’t think T.J. and Dave view what they do as a process that they create. So, in that sense, if you’re looking for a close connection between the notion of creation and the concept of creativity, it’s not a concept they are trying to pursue while they are on stage. They are not creating, constructing or producing when they are on stage. All they are doing is revealing or exposing what story is already there.

When I began the project and started interviewing them, that was a total surprise to me and something that I found really interesting. They feel like the show—they call it the “It” because they don’t have a better word for it—they feel that this “It” is already waiting for them on those three chairs before they take the stage. What they have to do is find out what is already there, what is already waiting for them, and usually they can find that out within the first moment of the show. The lights go up, they look at each other for five, ten, fifteen seconds in total silence, and everything is already there. Everything is in that first moment. So for the next 50 minutes all they have to figure out is, “Why are we here? Why am I talking to you? Why am I feeling this way? Why have all of these things been happening?” In many ways it’s like peeling off the layers of an onion over the course of the show and discovering, along with the audience, what the “It” has placed there. It’s discovering “It” in real time collectively. That lends to this almost cultish following that they sometimes have, this idea that, “We’re all in this together. We’re all figuring out where this is going to go.” And, at the end of the show, they’ve all figured out, “Yes, that is the end of the show.” They didn’t know this was the end of the show; it’s just what happened over the course of the hour.

Going back to the original question, if you have this underlying association between the process of creation and the notion of creativity, (T.J. and Dave) approach it from a completely different perspective. They are not creating anything. They are just paying attention to what’s already there. So, if you think that anybody can pay attention to what’s already there, anybody could, over time and with enough courage, overcome any insecurities or ego consciousness between themselves and this “thing” that’s already happening. And so we’re all equally creative. There’s no hierarchy in this notion of creativity. We can all possess it. We can all see what’s going on.

In a way, this all started back in high school, in an art classroom, painters-turned-filmmakers Andy Duensing and Chris Doyle meeting there. Better known now as the pair behind the collective the Deagol Bros., Andy and Chris, working with longtime friends and fellow artist-musicians Eric and Jordan Lehning, have spent from production to final cut the last five years of their lives making the at turns poignant and goofball, genre-defying coming-of-age indie Make-Out with Violence.

As chronicled in journalist Jim Ridley’s feature story for Nashville Scene, the production was beset early by stumbling blocks. Budget limit halts of production, wear and tear on the seams of friendship and at least one very ill-timed break-up roughed up the filmmaking journey. Yet despite these trials, the high school friends, not knowing if they’d ever have another opportunity to make a feature, sought to tell the most distinct and interesting story possible.

Pulling from memories of growing up in a much more rural Hendersonville, TN than exists now, Andy, Chris and Eric, all working from separate cities, began a script crafting process that would, in its final stages, blend styles of many seeming opposites. One part comedy, one part drama, another mystery and the last (very small part in the scope of it all) horror, Make-Out with Violence tells the story of teenage twin brothers Patrick (Eric Lehning) and Carol (Cody DeVos), who after the disappearance and death of their friend Wendy (Shellie Shartzer), diverge in their paths toward after high school futures. While the somewhat obsessive Patrick tends to Wendy’s barely animated (read: zombie) corpse, Carol chases, much of the time ineptly, his elusive, tender sweetheart Addie (Leah High.) Told through the eyes of the brothers’ younger sibling Beetle (Brett Miller), the story unfolds with a necessary level of detachment into its punchy and disconcerting yet graceful, moving conclusion.

With its deftly-handled blends of style and score, Make-Out with Violence is at its best as an experiment; it’s both familiar and unexpected, nonchalant and thought-provoking, slapstick comic and full of all that’s yearning and desolate. As such the film in its festival run so far has had both its fervent champions and its quieter skeptics, those who really appreciate its many layers and those who stand in some confusion as to what is ultimately being said here. It’s undeniable, though, that whichever side holds greater sway for the individual filmgoer, Make-Out with Violence leaves a person wondering deeply, and just a little happier afterward for having seen this mix of ideas, images and songs. As Andy puts it, “There’s a certain amount of room there for the viewer to experience the movie in whatever way they want.”

Talking here in phone conference, Andy, Chris, Eric and Jordan share stories about the film’s development, particularly the crafting of its memorable original soundtrack — the disc length of which is longer than the film itself, “by quite a bit” says Jordan, who worked alongside Eric to compose all of the tunes. In the background of our conversation, Kevin Doyle, one of the film’s directors of photography, folds origami DVD sleeves for screener copies of the film. He does this for a full hour while the four others of the film’s creative core talk.

How do you sustain passion for a project over such a long period of time?

Chris: If there’s one thing that’s kept this together, it’s that we really are close friends. We’ve been friends for ten years. It’s kind of like we were from the Make-Out with Violence world, and for a lot of crew that would come in and out, crew that were hired hands, they would accuse us — everybody who knew each other from the actors to the creative team — of existing in this bubble that they could never really get into. We were very collective and stayed together.

Luckily, when one of us would lose interest in the movie, somebody else would always keep the fire alive; nobody ever gave up all at one time. There was always somebody who rallied behind the film. That’s not to say everything ran as usual. There were a lot of obstacles, some of that being also the fact that we were all in a difficult time. We all moved back to home to make the movie, and we all left different things in order to do that. We pigeonholed ourselves into committing all at once.

Eric also likes to talk about how it was almost like we were in thirteenth grade, that we reverted back to the way we were then.

Eric: For me personally, all of the mistakes that I didn’t make in high school, I made in this Make-Out with Violence we invented. It was a time of baffling stupidity.

(laughs) I’d like to talk about the writing for a bit. Considering that you were writing from three different cities, how did you combine all those efforts?

Andy: Initially, when Chris and I started working on it, we had a general idea of a high school age movie that would take place over this amorphous period of time, the summer, and it was always based on our experiences from one degree to another.

Chris: We wrote a treatment that was just really rough, just the things that we would want to see in a movie like that. Because Eric was the only one of us who was a screenwriting major, the prolific writer among us, we said, “Can you write a screenplay based on this?”

Andy: We’d initially never really thought of making a horror film, but [Chris and I] both considered it…Chris knew that [co-writer and actor DeVos] was really interested in horror films, and that was just fortunate, that he is a good writer, got a perfect score on his SAT.

Chris: So we had four versions of the script going at one time. Then by January 2005, Andy and I were to fly out to California to meet with Eric so that we could finish the script and compile the best ideas from the four different versions. Andy ended up not being able to come, and so Eric and I just took all four versions, laid them out and tried to make sense of them.

Andy: Also, when Chris and Eric were out there working in San Francisco, and we were telecommuting in a way through e-mail, the music, which was always just an idea, really started [coming together.]

Talking about the music, I really love the way you guys not only handled the scoring from the beginning but also the way in which you focus on it for the Web site. I really appreciate those in-depth score notes, and I find the music so pivotal here, particularly because there had to be such stylistic diversity.

On this, how did you go about creating the score, and how does it inform the way in which you all see the film?

Jordan: I had a ton of direction in where to go with the tunes and a lot of the transitions from song to song and song to score…There was the pop song aspect which would sometimes segue into score. I always really liked the idea of really poppy music that’s both dark and interesting.

Eric: We started writing songs before we started writing the script, before the story was put down completely. So I was writing lyrics while I was scripting basically, and that was a really interesting way of pouring thoughts out.

Chris: We also lucked out that Jordan had been working in music for basically four to five years, and because he was in the studio, he was able to change up the music when he needed to. There were a lot of old demos from high school that he’d never recorded; Addie’s songs in the movie are basically Jordan’s demos that he’d been recording before he’d gotten involved in the project. When he wrote with Eric, he had a specific sound that would work for Patrick or Carol, but then when Jordan writes by himself, he does something differently in the working process. So there was a body of music that we could pull from, and that really helped in shaping [the film] because we were cutting to the songs, either right at the edit, or he’d go back in and re-record songs to fit the edit. So it was constantly a give and take. The songs were always evolving, and that made the process a lot more interesting than what it started out as.

There’s a pastiche quality to the film, with its huge amount of alternating humor and bittersweetness that weave in and out of themes of loss, obsession and coming-of-age. In the editing process, how did you guys balance between those styles and themes?

Chris: In general we tried to go with whatever we felt was interesting in a scene, and we had a lot of help from our editor Brad Bartlett in terms of getting a fresh set of eyes. He cut an assembly for us initially, and because of working other paying gigs, he’d come on and off the production whenever he was available. He definitely has a totally different cutting style than either Andy or I have; so he’d cut a scene for us, and then we’d go in to cut it. Then he’d re-cut what we had cut. We’d just go back and forth, keep changing like, “Let’s see what happens if we take this out. Or what happens if we throw these two scenes together.”

In a lot of ways we didn’t know if it was working. It seemed to work for us, but for a while we were worried that the movie would seem herky-jerky; it changes genres so quickly. In our initial test screenings, it seemed like people felt overwhelmed by the whole movie, but it seems like—the movie didn’t really change all that much in terms of editing—through Eric and Jordan doing the sound and music, they were really able to use that to orient you, to tell you what you’re supposed to be feeling and where you are storywise.

Seeing as you all have been artists working in different forms for so long, I wonder what you see as the specific purpose, or even perhaps necessity, of film that differs itself from other art forms. Why are you compelled to make films?

Andy: I really enjoy painting and working as a painter, but I think it’s really difficult for people to look at paintings anymore. Paintings are single entities, and they demand the presence of a person, whereas film seems like it connects more with a variety of people because it exists in time as a series of images and sounds. It’s a much more common way of getting information today, and so it’s much easier to relate to. And, on some level, it’s more interesting an experience to consider making art for an audience.

Eric: For me [making movies] is the most exciting way to tell a story, and I love telling stories, imagining other worlds. Movies are a space in which you can actually adventure, make it anything you want it to be.

Chris: I basically agree with Eric, that whole idea of creating worlds. One of the things I feel is of interest in other filmmakers, people who have a very distinct point of view, is that they are able to portray that cinematically, to make movies that have worlds that can only exist in a movie.

Then down to the practicality of making a movie I like the idea of making things in a collaborative way. That’s always interesting for me. Jordan and I have been doing some work together, whether it be creating a painting or working on his album. When we get together, it’s just about trying to combine all that.

Collaborative art making and filmmaking is not uncommon, but when it comes to directing, it’s a work method we’re seeing more and more of. With all the Sundance alumni—Quentin Tarantino, Todd Haynes, Kevin Smith—we seem in the recent past to have gone through this hyper-auteur stage of American cinema, and it’s nice to see that changing a bit. What is your theory on collaborative filmmaking as not a future rarity but as a common role, especially among the independent set?

Andy: Initially we thought that if we worked as a collective that if any one of us got out there, we’d all get out there. Then once we actually decided to make the feature, it became an actual necessity. In order to shoot a scene, Chris and I were constantly having to change roles; he’d be directing while I’d be producing, scouting a location and vice versa. So I can definitely see that as [a viable working method.]

The equipment now for low-budget filmmakers hoping to make film on a Sundance level is also at a higher level of production. But, you’re always still limited by time, resources; having more people working on a project on a higher budget level allows you more possibility and freedom.

Chris: Also, working on a low-budget, independent level, I don’t think any of us could have made this movie by ourselves…The fact that you have a group of people relying on you for your part forces you to rise to the occasion.

The hardest thing about trying to get everybody on the same page is in having to figure out when decisions have to be made and who gets to make the call about that, just so that you don’t wind up in arguments that last for hours and hours. The four of us, and my brother have been working on the movie the entire time, and we really learned quickly how to work in collaboration with other people and figure out what our boundaries were. That’s sometimes been a difficult process. That’s especially been difficult for me at times in working with Eric and Jordan on the music; I know nothing about music, so it’s hard for me, if I have a strong opinion about what goes in, to justify that, especially if they’ve spent days working on a song. If a song didn’t emotionally fit a scene, there was a process I had to learn to rectify that, some sort of shorthand [I had to learn]. If we wind up making another feature, we’re definitely all in a place now where it’ll be a lot easier to do.

As a branch off on that note about your brother, there seemed to be a lot of family involved in multiple capacities on this film. With that said, I wanted to ask Eric a bit about the acting and particularly those scenes played against Jordan.

Eric: Originally I was going to play the character that Jordan plays, and Cody was going to play both brothers, but his stand-in dropped out of the project like a week before—

Jordan: The night before.

Eric: We were basically picking up all of the film equipment, and we got the call from the stand-in to tell us he couldn’t do it. I didn’t know I was going to be playing Patrick, so I just had a really hard time finding that character. Halfway through the second shoot I felt comfortable doing it.

Acting with Jordan was pretty easy. The only thing that was strange about the scenes between he and I was that Andy and Chris were wanting to do some goofy brotherly stuff; I guess we’re kind of goofy together as brothers, and they wanted authentic brother bullshit. That was tricky to pull off, and I don’t know if we did or not.

How did you like the acting?

Jordan: I thought it was fun. I had a good time.

Eric: Jordan was much more natural, I think, in his role.

I do love the hard-fought anger that’s infused into the part of Patrick, that always under the radar anger. I never felt as if that was discontinuous, and I really appreciated that throughout the performance.

Eric: We had a really good editor.

Everyone laughs.

In anecdotes of levity, what are each of your favorite memories of the shoot?

Chris: I enjoyed watching our friend, DP James King drive his pick-up truck into the front of my car. It had a generator in the back of it, and it looked like it was going to land on the hood of my car. Luckily there was a two-by-four in the bed of the truck that stopped it from smashing. There was just a little damage to the bumper. So that was kind of exhilarating to watch happen.

Andy: I don’t know if this is my favorite moment, but it was definitely one of the most ridiculous. We were in the middle of shooting, and I got a phone call from the funeral director at the funeral home that we were getting ready to shoot at as the very next location, and we had gone through a lot of trouble with him to let us shoot at the home, to let him know that this is not a slasher-horror film. I guess he was very concerned about their image. So right in the middle of this shoot, I got this call, and he was absolutely furious because someone (I won’t say who) printed a request for extras in The Tennessean, which is our local newspaper here in Nashville, that said something to the effect of, “Summer blues got you down? Come cool off with a zombie. Be an extra in a movie.” It basically went on to explain that people could come be in this great zombie movie. So this funeral home director, who we had spent days and days convincing that this was not a zombie movie, was now not going to let us shoot there, and we had, like, an hour before the shoot.

Chris: Just to clarify we didn’t try to mislead people that it wasn’t a zombie movie, but at that point we were having a really hard time trying to describe what the movie was going to be like. So when the funeral director asked what it was going to be like, we gave what we thought was an accurate description at the time, especially because we weren’t thinking of Wendy as a zombie but more as a ghost trapped in a girl’s body.

Andy: Basically in order to be able to shoot there Chris immediately left the set and re-wrote our screenplay so that it would appear much more tame.

Chris: It was pretty stressful at the time.

Jordan: I remember, talking about favorite stories, one night, we were supposed to go in to have a photo shoot the next day—

All the filmmakers laugh in the background.

And Eric had cut his hair the night before—oh, yeah, he said that Mom cut his hair, told these guys that she did but that she had to leave off when in fact—and I think he and I went to go get Taco Bell for everybody and on the way out, he was driving, and he said something like, “I feel like a scarecrow. I feel like a scarecrow,” which cracked me up completely–when I asked, “Did Mom cut your hair?” he was like, “No! She didn’t cut my hair. I tried to cut my hair this morning.”

So, I guess that’s my favorite memory.

Well, here’s the thing: Any day that we knew that we got what we were going for was my favorite day. It was just such a long experience and felt like it was never going to end, and so any day that we knew we weren’t going to have to go back and do that again I felt really good.

Looking up at her co-star Souleymane Sy Savane and noting the pain written on his face, child actress Diana Franco Galindo pulled aside Goodbye Solo director Ramin Bahrani to ask why it was that his character at this moment seemed so sad.

“I don’t know; why do you think he is so sad?” Bahrani asked.

Not having read any of the script beyond her own scenes, Galindo thought for a second on the question.

Here, of course, is all the story background that she, in considering the question, knew nothing of: With this latest work, Bahrani studies the world of naturally jovial, curious taxi driver Solo who, in meeting cantankerous, suicidal fare William (Red West), is forced to reconsider the definitions of friendship. Opening with an already quarrelsome scene between the two men, Goodbye, Solo, while quite a comfortable film to engage with, its journey full of levity as Solo studies for an exam to land a job as a flight attendant, leaves no easy way out either for its characters nor its audience. William has full intentions of leaving everything in life behind him, and Solo, despite his growing affection for the man, must learn not only to let him go but also to help him on his way.

Knowing this perhaps makes Galindo’s answer to Bahrani in that moment all this much more poignant.

“I think because he failed his exam,” she says.

“That’s a really good answer. Why don’t you really encourage him to pass it then!” Bahrani told her.

”And she said she would, and thus she really fills Solo with courage and hope in the final scene to pass, and manages to cheer him up and put a smile on his face about the future, right when another man’s future has been cut and Solo is thinking about the past, mortality, fragility and the briefness of life,” Bahrani explains.

Although his three feature films Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and Goodbye, Solo all explore issues related to both culture and class, Bahrani would hate to be accused of making multicultural, socially aware films for any manipulative, sentimental purpose. “Those films, I have to confess, bore me. I never wanted my films to be that,” he says. Rather he, working under his Noruz Films outfit, simply aims to share what he found in that moment with Galindo, to uncover truthful emotions and reactions in order to present these in tenderly told stories about everyday experience.

To understand these very real emotions and reactions, Bahrani, much as he did on his previous shorts and features, spent six months tagging along with a Senegalese taxi driver in his hometown of Winston-Salem, NC. “[This man] was very charming, warm and friendly. He had a curiosity about the world and about himself. He was constantly trying to improve himself on his own terms. He loved reading. He didn’t always want to be driving taxis; he had other ambitions. He was struggling to attain them, and there were forces that were stopping him. All of those elements seemed to play into this fictional version Goodbye, Solo,” Bahrani says.

This six-month research journey also served as a learning experience for the director in another potent manner. It allowed him for the first time to discover the oft unseen people and places of his hometown. “Unlike in New York, where taxis are expensive, in a suburb of Winsten-Salem, it’s actually not the wealthy people who take taxis; it’s usually economically poor people who can’t afford cars, can’t afford the insurance. So most of our clients were working night jobs, managing bars or working cleaning jobs. Those were the people I was encountering, and thus I was encountering where they lived, which interestingly in Winsten-Salem is oftentimes literally on the other side of the train tracks,” he says.

“I find myself really fortunate to have a job where I can [learn like] that. That excites me and energizes me to want to work.”

Pulling from his observations, Bahrani then met up with co-writer Bahareh Azimi to craft a script carefully balanced between reality and narrative, a process which brought to life characters who Bahrani speaks of as easily as he would friends. “William is incredibly determined to do what he wants regardless of what other people tell him, and that’s something Solo has been struggling with. His wife tells him to stay here as a taxi driver in Winsten-Salem. She tells him, “I love you. Now you should not do those things; you should do these things.” He’s told by friends, “If we’re friends, you should do these things with me even if you don’t want to do them.” He’s told by the dispatcher which way to turn, right or left,” Bahrani explains. “William doesn’t; he doesn’t try to love Solo and control him. I do think that Solo senses that in the relationship and starts learning from it.”

Shot by longtime Bahrani collaborator, cinematographer Michael Simmonds, Goodbye, Solo, even more so than the intimate naturalistic portraits of Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, feels framed upon the landscape of the face, character disappointments made immediate by the slightest change in expression. Yet, despite facing great difficulties that are often beyond their ability to control or alleviate, the characters of Bahrani’s films still hold strong to unwavering optimism.

“The films are not to romanticize poverty, which some films can do, even with the best of intentions, to the disservice of the location, the situation of the characters and where they stand in the world,” Bahrani points out. “Nevertheless the characters continue to battle anyhow. That is something I’ve noted deeply, and it’s something I’ve wanted to attain more in my own life.”

A self-admitted lover of armchair philosophy, nonfiction filmmaker Andrew Neel prefers questions to answers. “Present day cinema, indie documentaries included, has devolved into thesis-driven filmmaking; people want a conclusion walking out the door. I think that’s the death of cinema.

“When I leave a film that I feel is really good, I leave with lots of complicated questions that I can’t always answer, that I don’t feel comfortable answering,” he explains.

In studying the little understood culture of political conspiracy theorists, Neel, along with longtime collaborator and co-director Luke Meyer, engages with New World Order several of these uncomfortable questions, the most unnerving of which are: Is there a global elite, this New World Order, that orchestrates the hierarchies and power plays in societies? Does this elite, more alarmingly, hope to handicap the world only to rebuild it in its own image later?

As it follows the leaders of the growing 9/11 Truth Movement, foremost among them incendiary activist Alex Jones, the documentary staunchly refuses to make any judgment calls. If at times the messages sent within the film edify too passionately, the calls “9/11 was an inside job,” and “Wake up!” forever after to play in the recordings of the subconscious, it’s that the subjects of the film, not Neel or Meyer themselves as directors, have spoken those messages out so forcefully. Opting instead simply to gaze with great compassion at its oft ignored and scorned subjects, New World Order, at its core, is much less about government machinations than it is about the profundity of humaneness in a world rife with confusion.

Whereas in their last directorial collaboration Darkon, a glimpse into the fantasy world of live action role players, Neel and Meyer had the freedom to engage with all questions of fact and fiction, with New World Order, Neel says, explorations were thorny in that through the process of making the film questions arose that, as the directors, neither he nor Meyer could address for fear of compromising their objectivity, and hence the film along with it. In this interview, however, Neel opens up to share his thoughts on the power of ideas, the problem of peaceful revolution and the little bit of fear he has for the future.

Each of your films has a unique internal logic. Obviously then finding the logic is different for each project. How is the internal logic for this film different from those of your other films? It seemed as if, to me, an even more intense compassion than was present in Darkon informs the logic here.

Definitely, the subject matter that our characters in the film are discussing is much more serious than it is in Darkon. The allegations that they are making, the theories that they have are pretty dire as far as they are concerned, and so our sensitivity to that had to be heightened, and we had to go to even greater lengths not to indulge in the specifics of their theories. That is, in Darkon, for instance, part of the point of the movie, the internal logic if we’re going to talk about it in those terms, was about indulging in the fantasies of the people who played Darkon. In New World Order we actually had to not get involved in the conspiracy theories. I want to make a very strong delineation there. These are not fantasies in New World Order. They are concepts; they’re ideologies; they’re ideas. In order to serve those properly, in our opinion as directors, we couldn’t allow ourselves the luxury of getting wrapped up in one theory or the other.

What we tried to do from the very beginning was not to over-educate ourselves about the conspiracy theories. We wanted to just let the characters talk, let them say what they had to say. There are plenty of people in the world who call them kooks; there are plenty of people in the world who call them messiahs. We didn’t want to get involved in that discussion. We just wanted to show them frankly as they are. What that demanded was that where in Darkon we created a cinematic reality that mimicked the internal world alive in the characters’ heads, in this film we tried to understand the genesis of how [the subjects] came to believe what they believe. So there’s a difference there. We were an active partner in the internal world in the players of Darkon, and I think, for the most part, we were not that in this film. We kept that at arm’s length and really stepped back and had a more objective, in a way traditional cinematic distance from the subjects.

Let me just say I’m very reticent—not that I don’t think it makes for an interesting discussion—to compare Darkon to New World Order. It’s more useful to contrast them than it is to compare them in that I don’t want to imply somehow that we made one movie about a bunch of people who believe in a fantasy world, and in this movie, it’s another group who believes in a different fantasy world. I don’t think that’s the case. A lot of what the people are saying in New World Order has many elements of truth to it. So while there’s a similar feeling between the two movies in terms of our relationships to our subjects and our compassion for them, I think it’s an inverted model.

And I certainly don’t mean to imply that connection…My feeling, when watching the film, was that both you and Luke were simply searching for moments of a pure humanity. Among my favorite of those moments is the one in which Alex, while driving down the highway, says that he’s so sick of these hit pieces from the media, that he always deceives himself into believing that he has relationships with these reporters that he later finds out are false. That’s such a shining example, for me, in the film of the raw human component.

It’s easy for the mainstream media to dismiss Alex because he’s bombastic, and from time to time, a little out of hand. He’s an activist; he’s impassioned, and impassioned people are sometimes easy to dismiss. Actually, Alex is a very generous, warm, charismatic person, and he believes totally in what he is doing. I think we tried to make that apparent to the audience. I do hope that people come out of the film feeling like they know and understand human beings that believe in these ideas rather than continuing to see them as two-dimensional stereotypes. “Conspiracy theorists,” that term itself, is a problem; it’s almost a derogatory term. They are so quickly dismissed by mainstream media that I think a lot of the good things that they have to say and have to offer toward a dialogue are lost in the mix. So we were trying to demonstrate to the audience that these are human beings with understandable, either mediated or real, experiences that led them to see the world in the way they see it.

The fact of the matter is that we all have religions, ideologies, political beliefs, social beliefs that are formed by our experiences. Those beliefs then go on to define our faith, I think, in a very grand way. For people who believe very strongly that’s even more true. For this set of people, these beliefs that they’ve adopted and that they’ve come to through their own experiences or research have come to define their lives in a really intense way. And I think that we’re seeing that all over the world right now in many different forms.

Can you give me another example of that, in perhaps another area?

Democrat, Republican, Christian, Muslim, Evangelical, Liberal, Libertarian. In the end, this is a film, in my opinion—Luke and I have been talking about this a lot lately—a film about ideas. It’s a film about the power of ideas to control our lives.

We all have a construct in our minds about the way the world works—about what’s good, about what’s bad, about what people are trying to get out of us, about what we are trying to get out of other people. We walk around in the world, all of us, with that construct, and it defines how we live. So [Jack McLamb and Seth Jackson among the other subjects of the film] are extreme examples of that because they are really passionate about what they believe in. It’s an interesting microcosm in which to look at that human phenomenon.

The part of the world that’s closest to me that’s like this is liberals. I’m surrounded by liberals; I’m surrounded by knee-jerk liberals, and every day I see them making misinformed conclusions about the world because of an ideology, because of the construct that they’ve created in their heads. This is baseline human behavior. It’s at the core of our experience.

We are exposed to information now in the Information Age, by an increasingly stratified and massive amount of data that we then sift through and use to create our ideas about the world. These then motivate us moving forward. All of world history has been built out of these ideas, ideas that are in our heads that we then bring out into the world, and it’s either a mess or it’s not. Everyone is engaging in this all the time, and all ideologies, at least to some extent, are flawed in that they have a construct around them, and hopefully the construct is flexible.

I also really love the point Timucin Leflef brings up. His response to this notion of ideas as control is that we, and he particularly though I assumed that statement into a “we,” exist in a state between fear and anger and that we all have a feeling in our guts that we have to save ourselves or everybody else from that same fear and anger. I wonder if that’s always necessarily true, that every idea we are presented with, whether that idea be good or bad, requires that we maintain that skepticism, that we are still going to have at least a little bit of that fear and anger when we’re introduced to that new idea.

Fear and anger are alive in every day life, just all the time, especially when it comes to trying to process new ideas and new information. One of the interesting things, I think, that Alex says in the movie is that people always dismiss conspiracy theorists by saying that they just want to make the world simpler; they want to make it all make sense because it makes them feel better and safer. Alex makes the really interesting point there that, in fact, it doesn’t: “It makes me feel terrified, it makes me feel angry, it makes me feel attacked, it makes me feel unsafe.” Then you look at someone like Jack, who says himself, “I live a very stressful life.” You look at Timucin, who seems also to live a stressful life on some level. It doesn’t seem like [the answer’s] as simple as that. Obviously there’s much more going on there than simply wanting to make a thesis for the world that is consistent…I don’t know why necessarily one type of person chooses one ideology and one chooses another, but I think that’s a critical question that he raises there and that I hope people walk out of the film with.

When I’m thinking about this idea of, “Why do we form our ideologies?” I always find that likely that answer is one based in our DNA, perhaps a chemical in our brain that tells us this is the thing we are supposed to care about. Because of that, [the derivation of our ideologies] is almost entirely unknowable.

Scientists, I think, are trying to figure out where that part of the brain is, the belief part, the religious part.

We’re able to look at our experiences, understand how our experiences affect us, but some of our eventual conclusions about life, about the world—how exactly, or why exactly, one person believes one thing and one person another is kind of mysterious. A little bit of that is alive in the movie in the last sequence. The last shot of the movie is of those two people who are obviously not part of the 9/11 Truth Movement; they are just standing there with a picture of some family member or friend who died, and they are overwhelmed in this sea of violence and global movements that are vast and very difficult to understand. Why seventeen guys would have wanted to crash a plane into those buildings with a bunch of peaceful civilians in them is inconceivable, especially if you live in America.

The world is a vast and confusing place, and we’re all in the midst of it. I actually think that anyone who claims that the conspiracy theorists are lost in the midst of it are missing the fact that they are probably just as lost. They hold an ideology that they believe explains the world in some clear, delineated way, and they somehow see themselves as different from the conspiracy theorists in that regard. But, in fact, they’re functioning on the exact same mental process; it’s just a difference in how they interpret the data.

One of the ironies of the film for me, and I think it’s a very beautiful irony because it seems so very true, is that Alex always talks of this revolution of peaceful information, and yet it seems as if the way in which he goes about getting this peaceful information out is very aggressive. I don’t mean to say that it’s violent, but it’s certainly aggressive. I think particularly of the sequence of Alex continually talking over the man who’s called into the radio show, telling this caller about the pigs, equating the police with piggies. I don’t know if that contradiction is always necessary, that in order to assume a state of peace there is a state of aggression that has to come with that.

That’s a tough one. As you said, Alex is a nonviolent person; he preaches nonviolence. Yet the way in which he gets his word out is extremely aggressive. I think for people who feel as though their message is being lost in the glut of information out there, they feel like they need to speak louder. A lot of conspiracy theorists look to Alex to be that guy to speak louder. Not everyone has the energy or capacity to do that, and he does.

It’s the peaceful revolution problem. It’s the revolution problem period, right?…There is always potentially a tragic possibility with activism, with revolutionaries of one sort or another—not that Alex is a revolutionary—and with people who want to change the system because it will be better for everybody, there is always a danger that it can get carried away and become violent. I actually think that unfairly gets applied to the conspiracy theorist population, and they get cast off as potentially dangerous. That’s nonsense. Of course there are dangerous people in the world, and some believe in far-out stuff, but to imply that anyone who believes in conspiracy theories is potentially dangerous is absurd.

Look, Alex predicted 9/11; he also predicted this economic crash. He’s onto something. In a democracy, dissenting voices are very valuable. I’m glad that Alex Jones exists; I’m glad that his voice exists in this society. I think it’s necessary and important. You don’t always have to agree with it if he’s not always right, but the counterbalance to the generally accepted principles about why people are doing what they are doing is important.

If anyone doesn’t think that people are sitting around, getting together and colluding in order to manipulate a system to their advantage, I think that person is naïve. We collude all the time. It’s our behavior. I collude everyday. I collude to get my movies made. I collude to convince my friends to come out for a drink with me. Collusion and conspiracy are how we operate, so I think it’s important when you’re dealing with a massive, bureaucratic government, like the one that we have, to always have that thought in the back of your mind, to be aware of the fact that people are, to at least some extent, self-interested. It’s not only for those ends but in part. So the fact that Alex gets people to think about that is maybe a good thing. In a way it’s the old “Question Authority” bumper sticker, which, as corny as it is a bumper sticker, I’ve always believed in.

Off that point, I don’t wholly agree with Alex’s assertions about the modern day lack of muckraking journalism, but certainly the lack of money in mainstream media has made it very difficult to see a diversity of independent surveys. All regional papers, for the most part now, are slaves to the wire.

In the film, one of the greatest moments that comments on this, another irony in a different manner, is the group protest at the Geraldo show. Here you’ve got Geraldo back in the 1970s with some bit of credibility as perhaps what Alex might have termed a muckraking journalist, and then these thirty-five so years later, he’s standing beside these dyed-hair, make-up plastered women talking about trivialities, wearing short skirts on an airplane, I think? It’s just a great humorous moment to hear this commentator saying, “This is the ugliest group of protesters I’ve ever seen,” and obviously these made-up lunatics on Geraldo look equally awful.

You’re tapping into one of the essential elements of the film for me. Anyone who is going to claim that conspiracy theorists are crazy, take a look at the world around you. We’re surrounded by madness, by Geraldo, by Iraq, by cruise missiles, by clips on YouTube of anonymous people being mutilated with .50 caliber machine guns from two miles away. The world is mad. It’s a crazy convolution and collision of multiple, incongruent ideologies.

But it always has been.

Yes, it always has been, but it’s intensifying. There are more ideologies. There are more modes of communication, more ways to express yourself, more divergent voices. Out there it’s insane. I turn on the television, and sometimes I’m absolutely confused. I’m totally confused by madness…Everyone is just bouncing around in this echo chamber of information that’s so available, and I think that produces a somewhat manic world.

Whether you believe that it’s an organized conspiracy, or whether you believe that it’s just happening, globalization is one of the most powerful forces, if not the most powerful force, acting upon human societies right now. It’s changing the way we live in a radical way in a very short period of time. This film is a study of that process in action.

Earlier you mentioned the importance of leaving a film with questions. With this film, what is the one most pressing question that you are left to ask yourself?

How is man going to cope in the mess that we have created for ourselves? When I finished this movie, I thought to myself, “My God, what will become of us? What is going to become of us?” I fear for our future. A little bit.

Outside the wind in Park City blows cold while inside here, in this tiny restaurant nestled away from the film festival hubbub of Main Street, filmmaker David Lowery slips off his jacket as he scans though the menu’s vegan options. In town for the Slamdance screening of his graceful, thought-provoking short film A Catalog of Anticipations, Lowery, more than this year ago now, bounces from venue to venue, sledding expedition to premiere party all the while returning to his hotel room in the breaks between to prep production for his debut feature film St. Nick.

Set in an isolated Texan winter landscape, the debut, which like Lowery’s shorts is as equally graceful and thought-provoking a mystery, follows a pair of adolescent sibling runaways who, for no seemingly better reason than that they can, trek out on their own self-reliant whim. Too young to understand the world as it is and yet too old to fully embrace the blind innocence of childhood again, the two scrape by, salvaging food from dumpsters and setting up shelter in an abandoned house. While aesthetically captivating and elegant, its shot design as experimental as it is fluent, St. Nick is undeniably a film composed of several provocative ideas and moments. It’s not always an easy film to understand, and that’s exactly, Lowery mentions now, just a few weeks left before the film’s premiere at South by Southwest, what he was after.

I love this notion in the Director’s Statement that you realized you were growing up on the first day of kindergarten, this idea that from that point on you’d have to wake up early. What was it like to be in that mindset as a child, and why do you think that idea occurred to you at that young age?

I wasn’t trying to make a happy film about childhood, and that was based on my own feelings. I remember being upset a lot as a kid, and so as I was trying to address all of that, it occurred to me that maybe that idea was tied into this [fear and anger] somehow. It seemed like a dynamic related. There was another moment I remember going up to my room and trying to knock myself out with a two-by-four; I was ten years old. So that’s an equally valid explanation of where the movie came from I think.

I was feeling a lot of resentment and other emotions when I was developing the project. That, I think, comes first. I had the idea for the movie, I was making it and then all of that emotion further came out as I was working on it. It wasn’t the driving force behind it, but it welled up as I was making it or preparing to make it.

The particularly scary element for me about this emotion is that for the boy, played by [Tucker Sears], his anger is never explained, and now this makes me wonder if even you can pinpoint why it is that as a child you felt that fear and anger.

Maybe it’s that I was afraid of growing up. I’m still terrified of growing up. I have a long ways to go in that regard, and I’m sure everybody probably feels that way. But, I can’t put a finger on it. It’s a vague, elusive cloak of emotions that you are just wrestling with. Maybe other people don’t feel that, but for me, it’s not specific. It’s hard to describe. I’m sure there’s a psychologist out there who could answer these questions for me, but I wasn’t trying to make a movie about why these things happen or why people feel this way; the fact of the matter is that they do, and that’s what I was trying to capture.

I like that approach, just in the sense that most filmmakers, I feel, who try to pull that, “Why?” off can’t get the message across. Yet in the traditional narrative set-up, there need to be exposition and explanation; the audience is constantly searching for the reason that events happen. In this movie, however, it’s nice to find that I never question that you don’t explore that, “Why?” I was too well immersed in the, “What? What is going on? What is going to happen?” It never truly occurred to me to think about the “Why?”

We did a test screening, and a lot of people do try to find a reason. People can make their own judgments. As far as I’m concerned, those parents are the most loving, caring parents in the world, and that has nothing to do with why the kids left. People like to prescribe these reasons. That’s the way it’s going to work, and they can ask me if they’re right. If that’s what they need to appreciate the movie more, that’s fine.

I never fully got the impression that [Savanna Tucker’s] character, the sister, wanted to leave the house in the first place. Rather, I got the impression that she was tagging along as moral support for her brother, and that idea is well-captured in those first lines of the film, about the sandwich he made for her not being very good. It was almost as if that line was less a judgment about what he was able to make for her than about what was present in his entire character, that she, as his sister, didn’t approve of his entire character.

She’s more of a cipher than he is, for sure. She stays level throughout the whole movie. I don’t know if she went along with him to provide moral support, or if he brought her along because he thought he needed her. Either-or works for me, but whatever his reason is for leaving, she doesn’t share it. They are not together in that, and the more the situation plays out, what I tried to do over the course of the movie is to show them gradually growing apart. He’s realizing, or not even realizing but coming to terms with the fact that, she’s not participating in whatever this is.

Well, there is a two year age difference between the two.

That’s part of it too. I remember the point at which my younger brothers and I ceased to become compatible as buddies because that little bit of age difference pushes you past one another in a way; it excludes you from that former circle.

That maturation process intrigues me, and in the last shots of this film, all I was left to reflect upon about this was this notion that if perhaps Tucker’s character was right to leave from the beginning, that, in just a few years, Savanna’s character would come to understand why he was right. There’s a joviality to the last shot, just because it speaks to so much security, but I also got an impression there of the impending hardship that her character would come to suffer, likely alone.

The flip side of that is that she’s where she needs to be, and that’s a happy ending, and that he, for even as rough a place as he might be in at the end, is, technically speaking, is where he feels he needs to be. So, looking from that perspective, this could be a happy ending even though it’s a very disconcerting one.

…The film has a whimsy to it; that’s undeniable. It’s not a hard movie to watch, I hope, and I hope it’s entertaining at times, but I definitely had to take a knot out of my stomach and put it in there in the movie. So, I hope, at least, it leaves people feeling a little unsettled in a way but not in a traditional, “Oh, abused children…” I wanted it to be purely psychological.

Along with that whimsy is a sense humor that the film has at points, and the moment that best describes this is the one in which Tucker, who I believe is talking about the passage of time and trying to get very philosophical, gets hit by a handful of dirt that Savanna wallops at him.

(laughs, remembering) Yeah, he’s talking about death in that scene.

That scene wasn’t written. We went out to the backyard, and I gave Tucker a few ideas for lines, “Say something like this,” and Savanna just responded however she responded. Eventually she’d just throw mud at him, and that was it, just those two being the characters and expressing their feelings on that topic. It’s probably my favorite scene in the movie, and it was completely just us coming up with the idea five minutes before shooting it, shot it and that was it.

It seems that much of the film came about in that way, as happy accidents, moments that you weren’t expecting, or in images that the crew on second unit might find. How as a filmmaker do you cultivate that much trust to work with your cast and crew in such fluid way that allows for that creativity without also getting scared that you’ll not have time to shoot the coverage needed for scripted material?

The script is only thirty pages long actually, and I went back to look at it earlier today for the first time since we shot. It was really rough. There are scenes where it just says, “Maybe this happens.” There were multiple scenes, which were alternate ideas, for various ways the story could go, and there were just sentences that generally described, “The kids talk about this.” I had a clear idea of the narrative arc of the movie, and so I never locked myself into specific scenes for the most part. There were certain scenes that I knew were going to happen, they were put on the shooting schedule, and some of them made it into the movie and some of them didn’t. With other scenes, I just found people I trusted. I found two kids who I knew were perfect, that whatever they did, it would be the right thing.

When I wrote the outline of [St. Nick], the boy was supposed to be fourteen or fifteen, a lot older, but then once we found Tucker and Savanna, I said, “I’m going to make the characters that age. I’d rather see what he brings to that part as opposed to trying to shoehorn someone into what I’d had in mind originally.” So it was just about surrounding myself with people I really trusted with whom I could just say, “I have an idea for a scene. Go shoot this.” Then they’d bring it back, and usually it would be amazing. We shot probably enough footage to make another movie entirely, double the length easily. Then, it was just finding, out of all of that footage, the right moment. I really just had a crew of people that I trusted intimately, and I knew that they would get good material. They understood what I wanted to do, and they found little bits and pieces that would get into my vision.

I wanted to work that way because working with kids, it was partially practical. They can only work a certain number of hours a day, and I also wanted to keep them focused, not have them get bored while we were setting up lights. So if we had a big scene that had a complicated lighting set-up, we’d go out in the backyard and just shot something else while we were prepping. Or, I remember shooting a scene with Tucker all by himself, and while we were shooting that, I had my DP [Clay Liford] shot the marshmellow sandwich scene with Savanna. It was just about trying to maximize time to get as much material as possible. In a way, it’s like shooting a documentary; you just want to make sure you have an abundance of footage to draw from, and although a lot of it was very planned out, my vision of the film also encapsulated plenty of fly-on-the-wall moments. So it didn’t need to be 100 percent planned out.

That’s interesting to me in the sense that the narrative was so taut that it felt almost hyper-written. I say that in the most complimentary way; to a certain extent, I love being able to watch a movie and almost read the screenplay in my head simultaneously. That was definitely the feeling I had here, that the film had the qualities of a really good short story.

I used to think of myself as a writer, although now I don’t. I think of myself as a director, and I use the script so that we can have a plan and some structure. I just try to get enough down on paper to let everybody know what the feeling of the story is and let them know what is going to happen. So much of it is just in my head as images. I think like an editor. I think in terms of juxtaposed images and all the meaning that comes out of two images clashed up against each other, or a single shot that lasts for a certain amount of time. You can’t really write that very well, and so I write enough of a script to create a plan that will allow me to then make that film that’s in my head. If it were just me making the film by myself—like I do with my short films—I wouldn’t write at all.

As I’ve sat on the film for a few days now, I’m beginning to notice what pieces of it are sticking with me, and I find myself so much more drawn to the story and atmosphere now that the hesitations I felt, when first watching the film, about Savanna’s and Tucker’s performances and then particularly about the choice to shoot on digital have faded somewhat. With that said, those concerns still hold valid for the way in which a first time viewer might see this film.

The idea of Tucker and Savanna holding up the entire emotional breadth of the film is still a bit of a stretch for me. For example, in the scene with Tucker and [musician and vocalist of Bosque Brown] Mara Lee Miller, although it’s a beautifully built scene, there’s still some feeling wanting, some sort of longing or hopefulness that I just didn’t see reflected in him at that moment.

As the director, I know you completely stand behind these performances, but how exactly did you work with the two kids on an emotional level? Do you feel that you got the emotional breadth out of them that you’d hoped for?

I feel I did. There were scenes that I didn’t feel the performances worked, and I cut them out, any of those scenes where I really felt that they were acting. Like you said, I’m completely behind what’s in the movie now, and any fault that people find with the performances, I would place that on myself. I’m not the best at communicating with actors. I don’t have that particular skill in the way that other directors do.

For the scene that you’re talking about—when I was watching Tucker’s performance, I was always just looking at what led me to cast him in the first place, which is that you can always tell that something is going on in his head a million miles a minute. He’s got these twitches of his face that say more to me than any of the dialogue does. The dialogue is a placeholder, and that’s why I let [the actors] say whatever they wanted to a lot of the time. In that scene, I love his performance; there’s a weird awkwardness to it.

In terms of working with [Tucker and Savanna], they never read the script. I would tell them what the scene was about right before we started shooting, and I’d say, “We’re going to do a scene where this happens now.” If there was dialogue, I would give them some lines that we printed out. We’d talk about it, and they’d read it out loud, but I wouldn’t let them memorize it. I don’t know what they thought of it a lot of the times. I have a feeling, because I think kids are smart, that they got a lot of what was going on, but I think that they also were unable to perceive the larger picture of what I had in mind. So at the same time that they might have understood a given scene, they wouldn’t understand how it would fit in conjunction with everything else. It was very much in the moment for them. Like the scene in which Savanna throws the dirt, it was just about however they reacted naturally; that was what I was after.

I’m wondering now too if seeing the film on a large screen television by myself as opposed to seeing it on a film screen with an audience renders the performances unjustly overly subtle. That too might be a limiting factor in my perception, and hence not so much your fault as the fault of formatting, how it is exactly that you’re seeing this film.

To a certain extent, yes, there are certain movies which I love that I would never recommend anybody to watch on TV, that I’d say, “You need to see this on a big screen without distraction.” That’s the film I aspire to make. I love to see my work on the big screen, but the fact of the matter is that most people who see this movie by and large will see it on television, probably by themselves with all the myriad distractions that life offers. If they’ve missed things, that’s not their fault. If I’ve made the film too subtly, that’s not anyone’s fault; that’s just the way the film is. It is really subtle, and I can’t really apologize for that. But, I can understand people not picking up on things or getting lost in the story in the way that I hoped they would. The fact of the matter is that that doesn’t always happen.

What I do hope, like you’re saying, is that there are certain moments that you remember. I really think that’s valuable. I endeavor to make films that last in people’s heads, to make films that don’t go down easily, that stick in your throat and remain undigested. Those are the films that I remember, and a lot of times they are imperfect films. They make you really question what the director was thinking. So you see a good film, you can tell that there’s quality to the direction punching through the narrative and that there’s clearly a steady hand behind it, but then there’s something that just rubs you the wrong way. That sticks with you. “Why did the director do that? It doesn’t make sense to me.” You think about those things over and over again, and maybe, eventually, you like that style, or maybe you don’t. That’s the kind of work I appreciate, films that make me think in that way.

I set out to make a film like that, and even in the script there are scenes that I included that I felt would serve that purpose. Through the production, and especially in the editing, I went after things like that. I tried to make it fairly thorny and not a 100 percent digestible, both narratively and formally. I like to put weirder stakes in. In that scene where Tucker is climbing out of the dumpster, there’s a shot that follows him after a long delay. It felt like an over-camera movement; it just didn’t feel right. The more and more I left it in, the more that I wanted to because it sticks out, and it somehow makes the film more memorable and special because it has a flaw like that. I like rough edges, and I like imperfection. I want things to feel handmade and have those fingerprints to them… So, if parts of the film felt incorrect to you, or against what you thought my intentions were, that’s good. I hope that it sticks with you and doesn’t fade from your memory, that the parts that are easy to digest will fade away and the parts that are harder will remain.

I do want to speak about the editing for both this film and Kris Swanberg’s debut feature It was great, but I was ready to come home, which is also premiering at South by Southwest. I love the editing in both, and you made the very simple comment to me in a passing e-mail that you edit in the only way that you know how, that it’s organic for you to make the choices that you do. How is it that you went about editing both of these films?

With my film it was a pretty long process. After we shot it, I didn’t look at it for about a month, and then over the course of three months I made a cut that was pretty close to what you see now, although originally it was 25 minutes longer. So I start at the beginning and then just keep going.

To me filmmaking is my way of playing music. I’m a frustrated musician. I can’t play the piano as well as I’d like to be able to, so I make movies instead. It’s all about rhythm and pace. I hold on a shot for as long as it needs to be held, and the pace dictates when to cut away. It’s very mathematical in the same way that music is and also very organic, beautiful and natural in the way that music is. You run into problems when you try to edit to solve problems. I don’t like doing that because then you’re forced to take that rhythm and pace. But, if you shot correctly, you don’t have to solve problems. You just cut the way the film needs to be cut. I did have to do some problem solving with this film because the shooting was so haphazard, and I knew that going in. I’d have to figure things out, rearrange things, but whenever a scene felt like it required too much work or had too many edits, in general I’d just lose the scene because that was not my idea of how the film would go…I just go with what’s right and feel my way along. I’ve got an internal metronome that kicks back and forth, and I just cut to that. That goes all the way back to the fact that I have a vision of how scenes will cut together when I’m conceiving the project; I have that pace that’s always in my head. If I could write with a timeline and specify how these things go, I would. But, that’s how I think, and formally speaking I think that music is more of an influence on me than other movies are.

With Kris’ movie, I cut that in four days. It was really, really fast. I cut a little bit while we were shooting, and then a week after we shot it, I flew to Chicago and cut the whole thing. It was fairly simple, and again on that film, any scene that was giving me trouble, we said, “Alright that scene is not going to work. Let’s just get rid of it.” That movie doesn’t have the same confrontational quality that mine does because Kris is not confrontational in her filmmaking. She doesn’t have that interest in the stories that she wants to tell. And so, with that film, it was much more about trying to make it flow like water, make it move gracefully from one scene to the next all the way up to the ending. It was important to me that as much as there might be a three-act structure to the movie—and I think the three-act structure is just inherent to any narrative—I wanted to make no scene anymore important than any other. We cut out a lot of scenes where there was an incident happening because those scenes called attention to themselves, and the funny thing is that a lot of those scenes were my ideas on the set. It was like, “Oh, we should have this happen. This will connect Point A to Point B in an interesting way.” But, ultimately anything that felt like a contrivance or felt written, as if it was a part of a script, we cut those out. For me that film, and part of this is that we cut so quickly, feels like an exhale. The entire story comes out in one long exhalation. That gracefulness was what I was after.

I’m amazed by all aspects of the filmmaking process but particularly the way in which moments, nuances in a film often develop unconsciously. Things happen with purpose, and yet that purpose is not always understood. That’s why I find it so interesting to ask filmmakers if these certain nuances were intentional, and I often find that they weren’t intentional at all.

That’s what I love about movies too. There’s a lot of work that I do which I try to be very intentional with, and that’s very pointed. But, that only goes to a certain extent, and I don’t think about it beyond a certain point. If my gut tells me that [a scene] needs to be there, I trust that, and that’s how it ends up in the movie.

Because I write criticism and think about film in a very analytical way, it’s very easy for me to explain my own work, but it’s also really scary. I don’t need to wear two hats in that way. I made the film. If someone else finds something in it worth talking about, I would love to hear it, but I don’t need to explain it. Everything I’ve wanted to say is already there.

So, as a parting question, what is one funny story from the set?

(laughs) When we were shooting the last scene of the movie, or second to last, I guess, with Tucker at the train yard, [we were shooting on] this big hill in Ft. Worth that overlooks this massive Union Pacific train yard that just goes on for miles. In the script I wrote that he actually goes into the train yard and gets on a train, but we couldn’t actually get permission to shoot that. We tried for a while to get permission, but it’s practically impossible for a low-budget independent film to get that insurance. So we just reconceived the moment with Tucker looking at the trains.

So we shot that off this main road in Ft. Worth. There’s a little dirt road you can pull up onto to park your car and look at these trains. It’s probably private property, but it’s off the side of the road, so we thought, “Oh, we’re good.” It’s me, [James M. Johnston, the producer] and Tucker who go to shoot this, and his mom offered to stay back at the production house. James is waiting by the car while I’m off shooting, and we were there maybe 30 minutes. We get back in the car, pull away and immediately after we pull back on the main road, a cop, who’s coming in the opposite direction, does a U-turn and starts following us. I’m like, “Okay, he thinks we were trespassing.” He doesn’t pull us over so we just keep driving. He’s right behind us, and we keep driving, driving, heading the two miles back to the house.

We’re almost back when he finally turns his lights on, we pull over, and that’s when I realized that there are three or four other cop cars there as well. He’d been waiting for backup. When I rolled my window down and heard him say, “Driver, please get out of the car,” I realized that they all had their guns pulled and pointed at me. They asked me what we were doing, and I said, “We’re making a film,” trying to sound cool and collected. They asked me who were the people in the car, and I explain as they pat me down, check me for weapons, have me get in the back of their car and lock me up.

I see them do the same thing to James. They get him out of the car, and everything that happened after that I get from him. They pat him down, tell him to get down on the curb and start going through my car. I can see that they were talking to Tucker, and James told me that they were asking him all the same questions that they were asking us, just seeing if all of our stories corroborated.

Eventually they let me out of the car and said that everything was okay but that someone had reported that they saw two men leading a kid into the woods at gunpoint. At one point I was following Tucker with the camera, walking down the hill with him, and so we figured that maybe they thought the camera was a gun. Then James was back by the car with the lens cap under his arm, which maybe they thought was a holster. This person obviously has seen far too many mafia movies.

As a wedding present, Kris and Joe Swanberg received, among other gifts, an ice-cream maker. Almost immediately, Kris found herself experimenting with recipes—whiskey with bread pudding, hot chocolate with roasted marshmallows, coffee and doughnut and gingersnap cookie, four flavors a season. She sells them now by the pint at a local grocery store. During the day Kris heads to work as a substitute teacher, and though she loves teaching and is pursuing her graduate work in higher education, it’s a transitional occupation that she says is rather worthless and unfulfilling.

Joe, meanwhile, constantly developing ideas for a seemingly endless list of to-make films, struggles with all those mundanities that thwart his creative productivity. “Doing my laundry or washing my dishes, all of these tasks are cutting into time that I could use to be making work,” he says. “If I could employ a labor force to dress me in the morning, do all these tasks, drive me places, and if I could have people simultaneously scouting locations for several different projects and setting up the paperwork with SAG, then I’d have the energy within me to make six or seven features a year, I’m sure. Now, I’m just physically incapable of it.” The statement, made during an initial interview, is all the more humorously appropriate considering that Kris answers the phone for the second of the two lengthy conversations saying, “Oh, I’ll get Joe; he’s just folding socks.”

In many ways, as most couples do, Kris and Joe see and think in very different manners. While Kris tends not to debate film, or even at times actively note it, Joe delves into every nook and cranny of a cinematic trend or debate. While she’s articulate although softer spoken, he’s passionately, loudly declarative. While she finds comfort in realism, he finds himself moving into a greater period of experimentation. Yet for all of these differences, and perhaps because of them, the Swanbergs have weathered ten years together of both romantic ramblings and professional collaborations. This is only just the briefest of glimpses at the Swanbergs as a couple.

With their tender, quite unintentionally well-fit companion pieces It was great, but I was ready to come home and Alexander the Last, Kris and Joe, at least on some level deep down, speak to one another through their art. Theirs are messages of loving but wavering, of mourning in a quiet way, of almost losing and wanting to regain, of friendship and fidelity and in both films –– in one quite literally and the other metaphorically –– of coming home. While very different in their outlooks, like Kris and Joe themselves, the films are beautifully made, their stories told with a maturity that speaks to a generation now growing up.

With her debut feature It was great, but I was ready to come home, Kris stars as Annie, who along with best friend Cam (Jade Healy), travels around Costa Rica nursing a broken heart. Although the break-up scenario is never fully explained, Annie hopes for some commitment that her ex-boyfriend is simply not willing to give. As the increasingly introspective journey continues, eloquent long shots of greenery passing in a slight blur punctuating this, Annie and Cam find less and less to say to one another, as if the trip were one very long phone conversation at the end of which there’s an inevitable and interminable pause.

More outgoing and aggressive, Alexander the Last studies the repercussions of emotional wandering spurred on by sexual attraction. When musician husband Elliot (Justin Rice) heads out on tour, stage actress wife Alex (Jess Weixler) finds herself progressively attracted to her leading man Jaime (Barlow Jacobs). As the attraction tangles itself in complications, and Alex’s sometimes too close for comfort sister Helen (Amy Seimetz) becomes involved in the mix, Alex is forced to confront her feelings and ultimately reconcile her dedication and promise with her desire and impulse.

Both films offer ample space for reflection, and if early buzz about the two films is any indication, much of that reflection will center on how Kris and Joe as people meet Kris and Joe as filmmakers, how the situations from a life become the situations presented in a film. All these questions, asked by both the strongest of supporters and harshest of critics, will make up the journey that though the Swanbergs take with separate films, they take, as they have for so many years before, together.

A common theme with both films is this notion of commitment. Through the processes of making these two films, what did you both learn about the idea of commitment, and how has that idea evolved in your minds?

Joe: Alexander… is more of a meditation on commitment based on a lot of thoughts that I had between making Nights and Weekends and starting this. All of the movies, because they are improvised, are in figuring out what they are about as we go. I learn a lot while making all of them, but probably I didn’t learn much about commitment while making this one because [I’d already thought of it] as a theme. So the learning experience came in other ways—working with actors for the first time, working from an outline.

Kris: I don’t want to say [commitment is] not a theme of my movie, but for me, I never felt that it was.

Joe: How about lack of commitment?

Kris: Well…I don’t really see that as what the film is about.

Joe: Oh, I do.

Kris: That’s what I’m saying. I don’t want to say that it’s not about lack of commitment, but to me it’s not really about that.

Joe: What’s it about?

Kris: (laughs) I didn’t know you were going to interview me.

To me, the movie is about a lot of things. It’s about self-discovery; it’s about that really intense friendship that women can have; it’s about attempting to do something and not really being able to do it. It’s about a ton of things for me, and I guess commitment falls in there, but to me that theme is not bigger than anything else.

Because these themes for you, Kris, seem to come from so many different places, would you say that they were subterranean in your consciousness as you were developing the project?

Kris: The themes that are tackled in this movie to me are very real life. Just like on a trip that you would take that would be like this trip, there would be so many things going on underneath the surface. I think it’s natural that in the way the film played out, [those themes] came naturally as well. So we were discovering these themes as we were going, although a lot of them I had in my head before we went.

Joe: For me this is the first film I’ve made where I wouldn’t have accepted that the couple would break up at the end. I’m usually open and loose enough to have whatever happens naturally between the actors determine the direction that the movie takes, but I would say that here there was no subterranean aspect in that sense, that the film was so much about commitment that I was determined to have it end a certain way, that the couple would stay together.

For sake of logic, I’ll break the next portion of my questions down first one film and then the other. So, Kris, we’ll start with It was great,…

Recently, I happened to speak with David Lowery about the editing process for this film, and he mentioned that basically what you and he did in the four-day edit was to cut out any moment that felt inorganic or situational. That note seemed to go into the comment you’d made two years ago that you were only interested in seeing narrative films that were like documentaries. Having seen Bathwater as well as Boys and Girls, I wasn’t surprised to see that you achieved this here, but I was so excited to see that you had. I was hoping you’d speak about that process of actually being able to make that narrative film that felt like a documentary.

Kris: That’s so funny. I don’t even remember saying that…(laughs) I totally feel that way still. Part of the reason why I think I was so interested in making a narrative film is that it allows you to get access, if you’re making a film in the style that I felt I did, to a realism that you wouldn’t be granted access to in a documentary.

While we were in Costa Rica, [David and I] were worried about plot, and it was like, “Oh, my God, what is this movie? What is this movie? What’s going to happen? Something needs to happen.” Once in a while when we were there, we’d come up with these little scenarios and shot these little scenes, and when we came back, we realized that we cut almost all of those out. Anything that we’d shot to aid a plot along, or use for exposition, we ended up cutting from the film.

Can you tell me a bit about how it was that you, David, Jade and [cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke] all worked together in order to build the story?

Kris: This is a movie I’ve been thinking about for over a year…Once Jade and I decided to make it, David and Ben got involved as well, and we didn’t really talk too much about the film as a group before we went to Costa Rica. I remember Ben writing me an e-mail and saying something like, “What are we making? Are we still doing this?”

When we got there, David, Jade and I took some Spanish classes before Ben arrived. After that we were talking all the time, shooting and figuring out what we wanted to do…We were in Costa Rica for three weeks making this, and I don’t think the story came together for us until week two. Once we had that together, we’d just sit around in our hotels, sit on the bed, have a notebook and just talk about what we thought—what we thought would be cool, what we thought would be right for the story, what we thought the girls would be doing, what we wanted to say with the story and then what we had to do to achieve that. We’d just all have these meetings, and since we worked together all the time, these meetings extended forever, from morning until night.

It seems as if, the story coming together in week two, the ideas having come up in such an organic way, they were meant to happen: you were meant to shot these scenes; Ben, David and Jade were meant to be with you. Do you feel like there’s that element at all with this film?

We went to Costa Rica not even really knowing what cities we were going to go to, the little towns we were going to explore. I had been to Costa Rica three years earlier so I’d done some traveling and had ideas of these different places, which is one of the reasons that I felt really confident shooting there. There was one town I went to three years ago that I just loved called Coweta; it’s this really small town, just really cute, and I really wanted to go back. At the time that we were there to shoot, there was a huge flooding on the coast, and so we couldn’t go to that town. So we went to another town and just happened to meet [supporting cast members Nick Drashner and Caitlin Donohue] who happened to be staying in the hostel there… Had we not met them or anyone else, [those scenes] may not have been part of the film. That was definitely serendipitous.

This makes a very subtle note in the film, one that most people won’t necessarily pick up on, that Annie comes from a Hispanic background, and that’s quietly pointed out when Cam defers to her about pronunciation. And so, in a way, Annie should be culturally at home in this foreign country, and yet she feels distinctly not at home because [her ex-boyfriend] Matt is not with her.

As more of a cultural marker and as a side note, do you feel that being in Costa Rica for that three weeks drew you any closer to your notion of identity as a Cuban?

Kris: My identity and my heritage I’ve struggled with for a long time just because it’s very much my blood and not very much my culture, and so I’m aware of it when I’m in Costa Rica where people have both. It’s always frustrating for me. It’s something that I very much want to be a part of but know that I never will. No matter how much Spanish I learn, no matter how fluent I’ll be, I’ll never be as Cuban as someone who was raised in the culture.

I did my entire senior thesis, a documentary, about my mom and why she didn’t teach me Spanish. It was a really big deal to me then, and I felt very resentful of her for not including me in that culture that I felt was my birthright. I was very upset when I made that film about all that. It wasn’t an angry film by any means, but it was a chance for me to explore that and ask my mom some questions that I’d never been able to ask before. That’s six years ago. Now it’s not that big of an issue for me, though I always do get frustrated that I’m not able to speak the same language and be part of that culture.

Language is so immediate, yet even in speaking English, assuming that should be a common bond between myself and others, I realize that within that there are many different languages [of thought]. This is another idea, this idea of the interpretations of language, that It was great… deals with. I love that moment between Annie and Cam where Annie says, “I just really wish you understood me right now.” It’s obvious that they are speaking the same language, but at the same time they are not speaking the same language at all.

[In that moment] I don’t think that either one of them is listening to the other one, and it’s really the only serious discussion that they have; it’s pretty short, and there’s not really all that much said. But, actually when we shot that, I think we shot for about 45 minutes, and then afterwards Jade and I had a two hour discussion about marriage. Well, we argued about it, and David and Ben went into the other room and put headphones on. (laughs) They definitely did not want anything to do with that.

…There is also a minor power struggle between Cam and Annie, just in the sense that Cam is always the one driving, until, that is, she gets sick. Was that a purposefully laid out power struggle between these two women?

Kris: It definitely was. It’s something that we talked about a lot. We wanted there to be a change when Cam got sick because I just think, and this is relatable for everybody and certainly not just for women, that depending on who you’re with, what group you’re with and what relationships you have, you play a certain role in that relationship. In Cam and Annie’s relationship, Cam is the leader. Cam is the one who has the ideas of where to go. Cam is driving, and Annie is not. I think that’s true in a lot of relationships, and that can be very frustrating with friendships. I find this with Joe all the time. When I’m with Joe, he’s usually the one who is leading. We’re in a different city, he’s the one who’s reading the subway map and figuring out where to go. When I’m not with Joe, then usually I’m the one who’s doing that. And so, there is usually some sort of power struggle in a relationship, and people have to find their roles and where they can fit in.

Another moment that I really enjoyed between the two women and that I thought was so poignant was the one in which Cam is doing handstands with [the fellow travelers that the women meet], and Annie’s feeling is, “Oh, this is too much work.” Annie seems to me a very functional character, yet at the same time, she has moments like this and the later moment when she goes into town to find a pharmacy and can’t find one, and suddenly she’s presented as a functional character who put in this new location is distinctly not functional.

Kris: She’s a very realistic character, and I didn’t want to make her totally inept. She’s social, and she’s friendly, funny and cool. But, also, clearly she has insecurities; she has problems with the break-up that she just went through, trying to figure out what she wants and what she’s doing.

That handstand scene I think is very funny and very true, and it also has something to do with the fact that her best friend who she is traveling with now has another friend and is successfully doing something cool with someone else that she can’t do and that she doesn’t even really want to attempt to do. So she pouts about it. I’ve certainly found myself in those situations. It’s mainly something you see with young kids, but it does transfer over into adulthood. It’s the jealousy of your friend hanging out with someone else and trying to figure out how you can fit into that situation.

When the critics get a hold on the film at South by Southwest, I feel there will be an inevitable comparison of this film with [Kelly Reichardt’s] Old Joy. I’ll be very interested to see if this comparison is used in a positive context or in a negative one. It’ll either be, “Why do these women keep making these beautiful, sad and quiet films about interpersonal relationships?” or “Yeah! We have another somewhat sad and personal female filmmaker.”

As a female viewing this film, my experience was one of a huge amount of gratitude because I felt so at home in the narrative. So here’s the question: I’m wondering why it is that when we see women who make independent films—and I’m thinking of Lynne Ramsay, Lucrecia Martel, Claire Denis, and this is the same feeling I have with Lynn Shelton’s work and your work here—we see these ideas that life is very beautiful and also very sad. There has to be a connection of those two perspectives with the experience of womanhood, but I don’t know what that is. Do you have any more notion than I do?

Kris: I told David I was bringing him along so that he made sure that I didn’t make a bad film. He said that he would, so he gave me a list of all of these movies to watch, of which I watched none. (laughs) Old Joy was one of them, and I haven’t re-watched it since I saw it the first time. Of course there are similarities, but I didn’t even think about that.

But, I think you’re right. Everything that I’ve seen that has been like that has been so much about what’s going on in the inside with the characters, and that’s really what I think is interesting. I really love films that are quiet and that are slow and that are sad—not necessarily sad, I guess, but usually when films are quiet, they are introspective. I don’t know why that appeals to me, why that appeals to you, or why that seems similar in different women’s work, but I’m with you.

If anyone can understand that conundrum, that will also, for me, un-obfuscate what it is women are saying with their filmmaking. I hope someone figures that out one day.

I’d like to talk about one other specific moment of this film, and that’s the tender moment between Annie and Cam in the bed. That, for me, is the pivotal moment in which Annie has this breakdown, and you learn how important Matt is to her. It’s an interesting moment in that throughout the film the cinematography always reminds the audience that this is definitively Annie’s story, yet in that overhead shot the focus is on both women. In that shot, the film is both of their stories. I was hoping you could talk about that perspective and then specifically how you pulled off the emotion of the scene.

Kris: I firmly did not think that I could have done that. If you would have asked me if I could cry in a movie, I would have said, “No.” I certainly don’t consider myself an actress in any way. That scene was just supposed to be one where it’s quiet at night and Annie and Cam talk about Matt. I didn’t want it to be lame. I didn’t want it to be annoying. I didn’t want it to be Annie complaining or whining about her situation. What ended up happening is that when we were shooting, I just started crying. I didn’t mean to. We didn’t plan on it. It just happened. I can remember that moment, and I just really became overwhelmed with emotion. I became really sad, me, Kris became empathetic for Annie.

The idea of someone going to Costa Rica to get over her boyfriend, when you hear about someone breaking up with her boyfriend and doing that, it’s almost juvenile. In a way you always feel like, “Oh, she’ll get over it.” It’s not something lost forever, it’s not like somebody died, but it is. It is a really big deal; it’s really emotional; it’s really terrible. I wanted to convey that in a way that was empathetic, realistic and wasn’t cheesy in a way that would make Annie seem like a teenager. Why that moment is so great for me is that it’s not really about Matt, her relationship with Matt and how sad she is that Matt. It’s about her and Cam. It’s about that intimacy of lying in bed with another woman and crying about someone and having her hold you. That is so unique to female relationships. It isn’t sexual; it’s just loving and maternal. In that moment in the film, you really realize how close these two people are.

Then, of course, naturally that closeness is almost too much at a certain point in time, and there’s a necessary retraction afterward.

Kris: I totally agree. Female relationships are really complicated, not always, but when you have a really close friend, a best friend, and especially in a situation like Cam and Annie are in where the friends are traveling together and sharing beds, it’s like a romantic relationship. But, it’s not, so there is that chosen distance, and when something intimate like that happens, there is a pull away effect.

Going into South by Southwest do you have any hopes or fears about how people are going to receive the film? Do you worry about the critics at all? I know you’re happy with the film’s journey and will continue to make films so long as these journeys are pleasant, but do you think that the reception of the end product has any bearing on your thoughts right now?

Kris: If for some reason I get to South by Southwest, and I get flooded with terrible, mean reviews and people walk out of the theater (laughs) because they just hate it, I’ll probably be really nervous next time I make a movie. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I do have some fears—well, they’re not even fears, I just expect it—that people are going to say that the only reason I got into the film festival is on account of Joe, that my work doesn’t stand up to that caliber, that it’s incestuous. People are always ready to say that, and that’s something I expected a long time ago, before we even went to start to shoot. It’s natural that people would think about that. I’m ready for that. I’m not too scared…I do expect some negative reactions, but I also hope I get positive ones. I do expect people to come up after the movie, and say, “That really meant something to me because I’ve had that experience before.” That always wins out.

Alright, I’ll jump over now to speak with Joe.

So one element that I was very excited to see revisited with this film was the focus on the experimentalism. I love LOL, and part of what I love from that film is the experimentalism and the fact that you are able to get away with this experimentalism so gracefully, fluidly and unexpectedly.

Joe: Well, that’s depending on who you’re talking to.

That goes into another point that we’ll speak about later.

Joe laughs.

But for now, I’d like to talk about where those experimental sequences came from and how, in the improvisation process, you decide, “Hey, let’s just pie ourselves in the face.”

Joe: It’s nice to hear that you like that because I do too. One of my biggest problems with independent film in general is that there is hardly any experimentalism, and most movies just feel like typical Hollywood movies, which is just crazy to me because we have the freedom to do whatever we want.

The ideas just come from everywhere, and usually the ones that sound the craziest and the most unnecessary are the ones that I end up getting excited about and insist that we put into the movie. I forget when it was, but at some point I was talking to Barlow, even before we were making Alexander…, and we started talking about people getting hit in the face with pies, how it’s not really something that we see much anymore. Right then and there I was like, “Sometime we’re going to make a movie together, and it’s going to open with you getting hit in the face with a pie.” When Alexander… became that movie, I didn’t matter that it was a drama, that it was a movie about marriage and commitment and relationships, Barlow and I had decided that we were going to make a movie where he got hit in the face with a pie, and this was the one. That happened all along the way with this movie, with LOL and with other movies. It’s kind of like they become these collections of ideas and moments that seem interesting and good. I’m not really spiritual or faithful in any other way than with my work, where I have this deep faith that if we take all of these weird elements that don’t necessarily seem like they’ll fit together, but we do the best we can and we do them sincerely, then somehow the culmination of these weird elements will be more interesting than any of them individually.

That’s how we get to that place, but then within the context of the movie, it’s one thing to say, “We’re going to start the movie with you getting hit in the face with a pie,” and it’s another thing to actually be there shooting that and thinking about how it works. Then for me it suddenly makes perfect sense because we make the pie, hit Barlow in the face with it, and I’m holding the camera and looking through it at this image, and then I’m suddenly like, “Oh, right, this is a movie about an actress and acting.” That’s when I told the actors, “Now that you have this pie in your face and look stupid, I want you to act beautiful and pretend that you are putting make-up on and looking in the mirror.” For me, that becomes what acting in one sense is all about, which is trying to look cool or pretty with pie in your face. (laughs) It’s a very embarrassing profession a lot of the time, and in some ways it’s sort of a stupid and weird thing to do with your time, even though all of us do it for one reason or another.

I wasn’t even thinking about the actors consciously trying to look pretty because they all looked so amazingly uncomfortable.

Joe: (laughs) I know.

On that note, I think this film is really well cast. There are moments from each actor that stay with me…How did you work with the actors here? I know, as you mentioned before, that it was at least a bit different, but was it significantly different than your approach in the past for films and Web series?

Joe: It was different in that the actors had different questions for me than a non-actor would have, so that was an interesting, immediate thing to deal with, figuring out how to answer those questions while also not answering the ones I didn’t want to answer. Part of the process is always in keeping everybody a little bit in the dark, including myself, as to what exactly is going on at any given moment. So, if [I was] working with somebody who likes to prepare, likes to know their character and who has these very specific questions, I didn’t want to make them feel uncomfortable, let them down or not give them what they were looking for from me, but I also oftentimes had to find quiet ways to say, “I don’t want to give you the answer to that. I want you not to know, and if that scares you, there’s a reason why I’m doing that.” Beyond that, everybody was great, totally willing to throw themselves into it without a script, and we’d often have to make decisions based on my whims, ideas and crazy notions. Everybody was a real trooper.

It’s nice that you say that the movie is well cast, but I can’t take credit for that necessarily because I based the movie around these people. If it feels well cast, it’s because those characters are specifically this way because the actors were playing those roles, not the other way around. I didn’t have an idea of this story and then go through a casting process of looking for the right people for the parts. It was more like, “These are the people that I want to work with. What story can I make with them?”

In that case the question is, and I believe this still does reflect back upon you: What is it about the energies of certain people that you’re interested in?

Joe: I wish I knew, other than I just know when I know. It’s different for everybody. Part of it has to be that I get a feeling from somebody that they want to be looked at and paid attention to, and that’s something that I can read best in people outside of a traditional casting process. I can get a better sense of that at a party than by sitting down with somebody to met for coffee, which is why a lot of my films end up being cast with friends and people that I meet randomly. There’s a certain exhibitionism that is probably present in everybody that I’ve worked with; whether they necessarily display that all the time or not, I, at the very least before I cast them, caught some flash or glimpse of it. They have to be smart; they have to have a lot of interest outside of just movies because a lot of the ideas for the movies come from conversations about totally other things. And, on a very basic level, they probably all flatter me to some extent; they’re fun, nice people to be around, and I feel comfortable and good in their company. Making a movie is kind of an embarrassing, weird thing to do, so I think you have to feel safe and secure around the people that you are doing it with.

I know many other directors and actors will throw themselves very consciously into the most uncomfortable positions that they can get, and somehow they feel that that’s where they can draw their best work from. So, it’s interesting to note that for you the work has to come from a place of almost hyper-comfort.

Joe: Nights and Weekends is the only project where that wasn’t true for me, where I was working in a very obviously uncomfortable situation. I’m really proud of that movie and excited about it, but it wasn’t a working process that I was interested in trying to repeat. But, other than that, if I’m going to spend all of my time, energy and money on these movies, I want them to be good experiences personally.

I do want to speak about the sound design for a minute…The scene in which is was first really apparent to me that you were doing something new with the sound design is in the one in which the sisters are juxtaposed, in two different ways, in two different locations, tussling over Jaime. How did that overlapping sound design approach come about, and how did you and Kevin Bewersdorf work together in order to get what you wanted for this film?

Joe: Just like with the movies themselves, the reason why I don’t write scripts, and usually why I try to go into the movies with as few ideas as possible, is that things will happen accidentally that will be interesting. I just have no faith that I have the kind of brain that could invent in a vacuum, to where I could sit at a desk and say, “I would like to, in my next film, write a scene where two things are happening simultaneously and through that you hear overlapping dialogue.” It’s just not how I think and throughout the history of cinema and other arts, I don’t think that’s how new things come about. I think that almost always they are accidents, technical glitches or something that you’re forced to work with.

[The overlapping dialogue here probably came from] the way that Final Cut Pro works where you drag a clip into the timeline, then the audio is attached to that clip and then you bring another image over the top of it and that audio is attached to that second clip. I was just editing without adjusting the audio levels, placed these two scenes over the top of each other and started listening to them both at the same time. That simultaneously happened with David Lowery while we were shooting the other scene when [Justin Rice and Jo Schornikow] were playing the music in one room and Jess and Barlow were rehearsing in the other room. We had the mics set up for the room that we were in, and then David took one of the wireless mics and just put it in the kitchen. The camera we were using could simultaneously record two channels, and as soon as he was setting it up, we looked at each other, and we were like, “Ah! Yes, this is a very good idea.” Barlow and Jess didn’t know and weren’t paying attention to the mic in the room and were just having a completely other conversation while I was shooting Justin and Jo playing the song together. But, I had the headphones on, so I was listening to these two pieces of audio at the same time. So neither party was necessarily aware of what was going on, but in my head I was focusing on the visuals of one scene, and simultaneously had in my left ear one channel of audio and in my right another channel of audio. I just knew that as a concept it was working, and so, even though we didn’t end up using the actually audio that we recorded that day, when I cut that scene, I instantly went back to that concept and blended those two tracks. That’s exciting for me. There’s room to play around there.

Then when I brought the whole film to Kevin, all the overlapping elements were in place, and so what Kevin did was to create a whole additional soundscape around the film and introduce a lot of ideas that just never in a million years would have occurred to me. We just sat down, watched my cut of the movie, and then as soon as it was over, he had all these great ideas about what to do. So it’s definitely the most complex sound that I’ve had in any of the projects.

So I have a few big, last questions for both of you. We talked about this idea of learning before, and so Joe over the course of your filmography, and Kris, with this your first feature, what is one thing new that you feel you learned from working on each of these projects?

Kris: I definitely learned how to direct a film. (laughs) One of my biggest struggles was learning how to articulate what I wanted in my head, and I had a really difficult time figuring out how to direct while I was acting. I think I’m in almost every frame of the film. Sometimes we’d shoot, and then I’d look at what Ben had shot, and I was like, “Why did you shoot it that way?” And, he’d say, “Well, you didn’t tell me which way to shoot it.” I had to learn how to plan a shot out and then how to articulate that to someone else.

Joe: On a technical level, I keep getting more comfortable with this camera that I’ve been using so that with each project I’m able to push in a new direction and be more specific about the look. Then each project allows me to learn a lot about the people that I’m working with. Jess, Barlow and Amy were not strangers but brand new friends when we started this project, and after several months of working together, several months of living in the same apartment, it was awesome, definitely learning a lot about them. (laughs) I’m sure they learned a lot about me.

But, [Alexander…] pushed me in a different direction. I’m not nearly as interested in realism as I used to be. It’s funny that you asked Kris about only being interested in films that feel like documentaries because I think I probably would have said the same thing a few years ago, and I don’t feel that way at all anymore. I worked in a natural progression pushing more and more toward realism, I think Nights and Weekends being the most like a documentary—no additional music, only natural audio. Now, Alexander… is pushing me back in the other direction, and the film I’m making now is even more extreme. Eventually I think my films won’t be at all realistic.

Both of the ends of these films seem to convey two meanings, one reading very hopeful, the second reading much more bittersweet, and so I was hoping that you both could address your feelings about the endings of these films.

Kris: The ending of my film, I think, is pretty sad, but I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s that sad. Here’s this girl who went on this trip hoping to get something out of it, to get over somebody or to gain something, and she comes back in the same position that she was when she left.

Joe: There’s something weird for me with all of the movies. As much as they’ve been improvised and completely re-formed to some extent, for some reason I’ve always been able to visualize the opening shot and the closing shot of almost all of the projects. Oftentimes those are the only two things I had when I started the project—I know how it’s going to start, and I know how it’s going to end, or at least somewhere along the way, the ending comes very clearly to me. That definitely happened on Alexander…, where, at some point, I just had this image in my head.

We’ve obviously been seeing this play throughout the film, and in the final shot, we get to see its performance. On a much deeper, more symbolic level, the shot has several meanings, inside the context of the movie and outside of that personally for me.

Here then is one personal question: It seemed to me as if Alexander the Last, being dedicated to Kris, is equal parts a love song and an apology. Is that accurate?

Joe: Absolutely, it’s definitely both. Nights and Weekends was a very difficult movie for me to make and for our relationship, so it felt great to be able to make a movie that was a much happier experience and also to be able to obviously apologize in person within our relationship but in a more public way, in a more artistic way, to make a love letter to her.

On the other end of the phone line, first time feature director though veteran film and television producer Dia Sokol admits that she’s more than a bit nervous for this interview about her naturalistic “anti-chemistry, unromantic comedy” debut Sorry, Thanks. “This never used to happen to me. As a producer, I’d listen to directors fumble their way through describing their films, and I’ve always jumped in and been the person to sell it, to be articulate about it, and now I totally get it,” she says. “When it’s your film, you’re totally inarticulate about it; it comes from inside of you, so you have no perspective.”

Starring a mixed cast of professional and non-professional actors and shot by a skeleton crew in San Francisco’s endearingly eccentric Mission District, Sorry, Thanks follows two adrift lonesomes Max (Wiley Wiggins) and Kira (Kenya Miles), neither of whom, even after a shared one-night stand, can begin to reconcile their thoughts on romantic relationships. As Max chases Kira, detaching himself along the way from longtime girlfriend Sara (Ia Hernandez), and attempts to immune himself to the criticism of his best bud Mason (Andrew Bujalski), Kira explores an uninspiring dating scene that only very quietly pinpoints the sadness of her recent break-up.

Despite its bittersweet, introspection-inducing lining, Sorry, Thanks is at its core incredibly funny, even at times painfully funny. Foibles are so at the surface, sarcasm so easily blended with childlike wonder that it’s simple to just enjoy the film without questioning every character intention and situation repercussion. It’s easy, namely, to root for Max and Kira even as they stumble into moral quagmires, and that’s where Sokol, in only the most articulate of manners, begins discussing her work.

[In the film’s production notes] you pose the question, “Can we still love these characters even when they are doing things wrong?” For me that answer with this film was, “Yes.” Yet I don’t fully know why it is that I still have that faith even as I watch these characters fall into situations that are morally gray. So, this idea of the moral quandary, I was hoping that we could start our talk there.

I started my career working for Errol Morris, and that informed a lot of my skepticism about the idea of redemption. So, when I talked to [co-writer and producer Lauren Veloski] about starting to write this, I said, “I really want to make a film that’s about redemption.” (laughs) When I look at this film now and think about that, to me it’s a reminder, “Oh yeah, and I don’t believe in redemption.” I believe in it as a concept, but I don’t know that I believe in it as an actuality. I don’t think the world works that way, and I’m incredibly ambivalent about films that act like you can make up for your bad actions. So, in some ways, I wanted the film to be about, “When you break something, is it really broken?”

In this case, our faith in the characters, our trust in the characters, those characters are always breaking it. Are we going to be able to forgive them and move on? Every character, even the smaller characters, get co-opted into that question. When we’ve done small test screenings of the film, we’ve definitely gotten feedback about all of the characters, and everyone is split down the middle. They either loved Max and loved Kira, or hated one of the two, and that’s even when they’d really enjoyed the story. Every character was on every list, the hate and love lists. That’s when we knew that we could stop editing and when our job was done.

When you’re making a really small film, the moral quandary is what you have to work with as the most authentic narrative tool…I like the idea of making a film about people who are doing bad things who might never really be accountable for their actions but who you like regardless, who you’re drawn to and identify with. That’s really what life is. In Hollywood movies people do bad things, and there are tons of consequences. In real life and in the film, there are consequences, but they’re not as direct. It’s fun to be able to play with that subtlety.

Also, I like the idea of being able to implicate the audience. Because the film’s a comedy, and because we’re watching it happen, we’re laughing all the way along, all the way to the end. We get implicated in their bad behavior. That felt very much like the key to the film.

It’s definitely a conversation that I’ve had with [filmmaker Andrew Bujalski, whose much-lauded features Sokol has produced] multiple times through the many projects that I’ve worked with him on. We talked about it a lot with Mutual Appreciation. Do the characters lack a moral center? There’s a very short scene in this film, in the bar scene right after Kira has talked with her best friend Rachel, and then when Sara and Max show up, Kira and Sara are having a conversation about a movie, and they’re saying, “Oh, I don’t know. I think the character lacks a moral center.” That’s a tiny, little moment where I always felt like, “Well, isn’t that…?” We slipped it in because it’s like, “Do these characters lack a moral center?” Basically. Then I think, “Does everybody lack a moral center?” It’s a pretty cynical idea.

I’m actually not a relationship cynic at all. I’m a total romantic. I may have written a film in a more cynical mindset, being doubtful about finding any real connection with people, but…

I wonder if the fact that you are a romantic is the reason that you felt confident enough to be able to make a film that’s semi-cynical about relationships. This, for me, is just not a film that could have come from a true relationship cynic. Not only is it too comic and light-hearted, it’s also too level-headed.

Interesting. I think there’s real value to people thinking that they have connections to other people, even if, from the outside, it doesn’t look like that. Because this is a film that’s basically like a conversation with your friends, or at least parts of it are, you can imagine any of these characters calling you up to obsess about the situation that they are in. And, you can think you know all the answers to these relationship problems, but it doesn’t change the fact that Kira and Max are projections of each other’s needs; that has it’s own value, even if that doesn’t mean that it’s the greatest love story ever written.

What’s fascinating is that when we’ve shown this film to the small test audiences, half of the people say, “I think that Kira and Max end up together, and this is just a tough time.” That’s the part that comes from Errol Morris, that idea that if you give people a protagonist, it doesn’t matter how abhorrent they are, we want to believe the best. We will reach out with our best hopes and project our best expectations onto them. That turns out to be true with a love story, that a lot of people think, “This is just the beginning of a love story. It’s just the part that you don’t get to see explored very often.” I love that.

(For a time, Sokol and I speak a bit about the importance of withholding an authorial editorial comment, that because no judgment is made of the characters in the film, they are, even for their flaws, able to charm the audience. The process of writing such complex characters, who at the same time suffer lack of self-awareness, however, is far from simple.)

…Frankly, it’s been a very, very frustrating endeavor to try to make a film about a woman who’s really shut down. It’s hard to write it; it’s really hard to direct it. I feel like I didn’t have a lot of models to look at. I didn’t want to overdo it; I wanted [the Kira] performance to be consistent, as opposed to all of the other performances I was seeing in which the women were really restrained until they exploded. That’s a very different kind of acting, a very different kind of performance.

Why do you say that? Even if you don’t have examples of that emotional restraint in other pieces of art, that’s such an everyday life conundrum for women that I would think it easy to pick up on. I feel like people in general, but especially women, aren’t particularly honest with their emotions.

Really? That’s so interesting. Maybe it’s just my perception that woman are so emotionally astute that I found when I was writing that it was easier sometimes to write scenes between the guys. They can be so overtly distant from what their emotions are, what’s really happening and what they’re trying to do for each other that they’re already buried beneath two levels of emotion; their motivations and intentions are already buried down two levels.

Maybe this is just with the [women] characters I created because I felt like I knew them and understood them, I felt like it was hard to have them talk about emotion and not have them sound incredibly boring and on the nose in the same way as a Lifetime movie. It was a challenge, but maybe it was just a challenge for me. Maybe it’s not true; maybe women don’t know their emotions…But, it was very hard to make that authentic.

We’ve talked about all of these big, heavy themes, but as with what you’ve said in the production notes, and what I felt watching the film, these ideas of morality don’t really show up until the last scene of the film. The rest of the film is just so incredibly comic that I run the risk here, by asking you all of these questions, of making the film seem didactic, when it’s not at all that.

It shouldn’t be! It’s a comedy. It’s light…People should sit back, enjoy it and laugh as these characters fumble and not pursue at top speed their own journeys of self-discovery.

On that note, each filmmaker, with his work, walks his own path of self-discovery…What self-discovery process did this film force you to go through?

Filmmaking is hard—everybody knows that—but I don’t think I realized quite how much directing is about forgiveness. Every morning when we were making the film, I’d wake up, and I’d think, “Directing is about forgiveness.” I remember that after the very first day of shooting I learned so much. That first day I had to rethink the whole film because I realized that there were a lot of things that weren’t going to be good for me, or for the project at least. I remember coming home, and my boyfriend [Garret Savage], who was also our on-set editor and media manager, was also cutting a documentary full-time during the day, and I’d come home with the footage, and he’d take a look at it, download all of it, get it organized and cut scenes together so that I could take a look. And, that day, he pointed out some problems with the very first scenes we shot and asked me, “Well, how are you going to do this and that?” I was like, “Oh, this is great! Feedback! Thank you so much. I’m so glad that I learned that, that I made those mistakes. Glad I got that out of the way.” (laughs) I was so naïve. I swear to God I thought, “Oh, I’m so glad I made the mistakes on my first day. Now I can go make the rest of the movie,” not realizing that—it’s ridiculous—every day you’re making a million decisions and a million intuitive calls. I’ve done that with producing, but it’s so different with directing. It’s like, “Oh, I get it. Every day there’s going to be a list of ten things that will keep me up at night.”

I was in Berlin with Andrew for the premiere of Beeswax, and we were talking about these differences. He was asking me about what it’s like now for me as a director, and I was telling him, “I didn’t realize I could be so insecure. I always felt so confident doing what I’d been doing.” I don’t mean to sound overly confident, but I always felt competent. I always felt relatively secure in what my job is. I know what it is, and I know what I do. I was like, “It was harrowing. It was excruciating. It was fascinating and energizing and the most awful thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t wait to do it again.” (laughs) We were just laughing because that’s basically exactly what it’s like. It’s a level of engagement that I’d never thought I’d have professionally.

I’m always interested to hear how writing teams work. How did you and Lauren collaborate?

I’d written Kira’s part of the story as a full script almost a year before bringing Lauren on board. I knew the themes of the script, but it still wasn’t totally there for me. I kept on taking a stab at this Max character, I felt like he was the key to the story, but I wasn’t loving what I was coming up with. I knew Lauren very peripherally, although I liked her a lot. We’d worked together a bit, so I called her, and knowing that she was a screenwriter and incredibly smart, I said, “Do you want to take a stab?” I didn’t ask her to re-write the existing script, but I had this idea that we’d take on these two characters with separate but overlapping fears. So I talked to her, gave her an outline of what I knew about Max, and she went off to create him, his world and his friends. Then we started working together to see how the pieces fit together. By the end we both felt real ownership of the whole script. It started as these very separate pieces, and by reading scenes through and making line-by-line changes, it ended as very integrated. Sometimes one of us would go off and write a new scene, and then bring it back for the other to give feedback. It was a very non-traditional process. It wasn’t like, “She starts the sentence, and I finish it.” It was with true respect, I think, for our different styles. We both knew certain characters better than others, and we tried to use that to the advantage of the film, to really have it feel like these were different characters penned by different people, that they had truly different voices.

I also appreciate the fact that the film isn’t exposition heavy.

We have some of that, and sometimes you need it and try to do it in the most minimal, sincere way. That was definitely a challenge, and we could tell. We were just hysterical when we were writing. We would just read it through together and laugh and laugh any time we were too on the nose. We were like, “Oh, my God! That won’t work at all!”

We also both think Back to the Future is, like, the best movie ever made, and so we used it as our guide for everything. Lauren can go through scene-by-scene in the movie and tell you how it corresponds to a scene in Back to the Future. We were like, “Wait, this is exactly like the scene where he’s in the tree. What is our device?” Then we got worried, because we were overly obsessed, that it would be too obvious that this movie is Back to the Future.

So a wrap-up question: What is one question that you’ve wanted to be asked about Sorry, Thanks, either from people who’ve worked on the film or the others who’ve seen it, that you’ve wanted to be asked but have yet to be asked?

Clearly I want them to ask me about the cats! Who could not be impressed with a cat? So, maybe my question is, “How is it to direct cats?”

So, how is it directing cats?

It’s incredibly challenging. They had some really intense ideas about their roles, and they wanted to take them in their own direction…Napkin, the stray cat—well, both cats had a lot of ideas frankly—but Napkin’s ideas mostly were about the blocking on the mantle, and I felt they were pretty out there. Napkin really wanted to break the fourth wall in order to see the other crew members as they were holding the equipment and bounce boards. We talked a lot about it, and at the end of the day I feel like I got my way and fooled Napkin into doing what I wanted. I’d work with her again.