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.

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I’ve been in New York for a grand total of about two weeks in the last month and a half, so I missed most of the press screenings for New Directors/New Films, the annual co-production of MoMA and the Film Society at Lincoln Center, which opened last night. We’ll be publishing a recap of the full festival from Brandon Harris tomorrow, but I wanted to drop some notes on the one film for which I did have a chance to attend a press screening, Harmony & Me.

Written and directed by Bob Byington (his RSO: Registered Sex Offender premiered at SXSW last year and then played around the country on the Range Life tour) and edited by Frank V. Ross (Hohokam, Present Company), the film was shot in Austin and features a number of faces that will be familiar to devotees of SXSW cinema and its descendants: Justin Rice as Harmony, a “loser” who we meet mid-heartbreak at the hands of a brunette succubus (Kristen Tucker); Alex Karpovsky as a friend whose verbal abuse of his sweetly nerdy wife is played for uncomfortable laughs — and serves as a reminder to Harmony that relationships are inevitably sad and cruel as often as they’re legitimately romantic; Pat Healy as the dickish boss at Harmony’s cubicle job; Allison Latta as an outlandishly outgoing neighbor who sets her sights, against his wishes, on our retiring hero.

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Kevin Lee’s vigorous defense of Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax — surprisingly divisive when it premiered at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival –– included a thematic interpretation of the film’s title. He wrote that Beeswax, a picture which has nothing directly to do with either bees or wax, was titled as such as “a tip to the film’s depiction of life as a hive, where people passive-aggressively fall on each other for support in the face of life’s overwhelming choices, and in doing so both limit and enable choices to be made.” It’s right to shine a light on Beeswax as a film about a community’s interconnectedness — and probable that the nuances of that specific community, Austin, might feel like flat, mundane Americana to an eye hoping for a retread of the classically cool “disaffected rocker in black and white” vibe of Mutual Appreciation. But the title also seems like something of a multi-layered reference to the film’s ambitious leap ahead of Bujalski’s previous filmography. Having built a following based on two finely calibrated odes to linguistic imprecision, Bujalski’s third film moves away from messy, non-committal “mumbling”, in order to cleverly examine the double-speak of slang, simile and idiom that flows through American conversation uninterrogated. As a moniker for this crayon-colorful (and beautifully shot) comedy steeped in colloquial American English, the title Beeswax feels less like a metaphor for anything bees do in public, than a veiled reference to private lives - as in, “mind your own beeswax.”

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