While I was on vacation (did you miss me? did you even realize I was gone?) David Lowery posted an interesting pair of videos on his blog: the first nine minutes of his feature St. Nick; and a webseries episode shot in 2007 that became a kind of video sketch for the opening of that film, albeit with a much older male lead. St. Nick, which won a prize at the AFI Dallas Film Festival and which I became a big fan of at SXSW earlier this year, screens in Seattle on July 24, and will have its New York premiere on August 28 at Rooftop Films.

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.

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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.

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Two kids — a boy of 11, and a girl of 9, brother and sister, apparent runaways — drag a duffel bag into a crumbly, seemingly abandoned house. Now they live there. No one seems to be looking for them, and they offer no explanation as to where they came from or why they ran away. They could as likely be aliens as lost little children. It’s almost as if they’ve drifted off into another realm, some kind of Oz.

The first half of David Lowery’s feature directorial debut St. Nick is devoted to the ways in which this family unit spends their days building a life in their new home. Procuring provisions for cheese sandwiches, salvaging furniture, fixing the toilet. Arguing about the fate of the dog they left behind, and whether or not he misses his under-age owners. Virtually wordless for long stretches of time, St. Nick relies heavily on contemplative imagery to convey meaning –– particularly, the clear-lit landscape or a Texas winter in juxtaposition with the pink-and-white faces of his two young stars, real-life siblings Tucker and Savanna Sears. As both types of images, both equally beautiful and mysterious, become increasingly gray, the film matures from a study of actions infused with a quiet magic, to a study of inaction, of waiting and drifting telegraphing an increasingly palpable sense of fear and dread.

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As SXSW 2009 approaches we’ll be asking filmmakers to spill the superficial details about their films, to tell us all the deep personal details of what makes them tick, and –– new this year! –– reveal who they had to sleep with, in the incestuous conspiracy-minded secret society that is the wider SXSW community, in order to get their film programmed at the festival.

Disclosure time! David Lowery wrote a few reviews for us last year at SXSW. This year, he will not be writing for us, but he will be at the Festival representing his first feature, St. Nick. Workshopped last summer at the IFP Filmmaker Lab, the Emerging Visions entry follows “the adventures of a brother & sister trying to survive, all on their own, out on the plains of Texas.” David answers to The 5 Questions We’re Asking Everyone involve taking inspiration from Ernest Goes to Camp and praise for SXSW spontaneity. There’s more info on St. Nick’s website, and at David Lowery’s blog.

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The lineup for the 2009 SXSW Film Festival is now out, and pasted in full after the jump. First skim highlights:

• Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax, which will world premiere in a matter of days in Berlin.
• Sorry, Thanks, directed by Dia Sokol (producer of Mutual Appreciation and Nights and Weekends), and starring Wiley Wiggins and Bujalski.
• New features by both Joe Swanberg (Alexander the Last, starring Jess Weixler, Justin Rice and Barlow Jacobs) and Kris Swanberg (It Was Great, But I Was Ready To Come Home, screening in Narrative Competition).
• Objectified, a new documentary by Helvetica director Gary Hustwit.
• True Adolescents, about an “Aging indie rocker” who “takes two teen boys on an ill-fated hiking trip.” Starring Mark Duplass and Melissa Leo.
• Creative Nonfiction, a narrative feature by Lena Dunham starring Eleonore Hendricks (The Pleasure of Being Robbed).
• St. Nick, directed by David Lowery, who reviewed Robbed for us at SXSW last year.
• Some of our favorite films from Sundance 2009, including Moon, Humpday, and You Won’t Miss Me.
• Toronto favorites Goodbye Solo, The Hurt Locker and Three Blind Mice.
• Early contender for Best Title & Synopsis, Sight Unseen: Make Out With Violence, described as “A rock musical wherein the living love the dead and break into silence instead of song.”

I’ll be at SXSW once again this year, so if there’s anything on the lineup you’re particularly looking forward to that you’d like to see coverage of, let me know if the comments.

We’ll also be doing pre-SXSW coverage again this year, so if you’re a filmmaker showing work at SXSW this year, and you’d be interested in being featured in one of our SXSW previews and/or can send us a screener, do get in touch by sending an email to karina AT spout DOT com. If you can send us a screener before the festival, you definitely improve your chance of getting covered.  If you do send a screener and we don’t like the movie, we won’t write about it at all until after the premiere (and unless it’s problematic to the point where we think a negative review would spark an interesting discussion, chances are we probably won’t write about it at all). But, like some films we screened before the festival last year (see Medicine For Melancholy, My Effortless Brillance and Yeast), if we fall in love with your movie, chances are we will never shut up about it.

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…the structure of the film reminded me of that most formalist of children’s programming: the Teletubbies. For those of you who’ve never had a chance to experience the show, it’s important to understand that the structure is rooted in repetition. Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Po and Laa-Laa all take turns exhibiting short subject documentaries via the televisions embedded (in true Cronenbergian fashion) in their stomachs. Once a given clip concludes, the Teletubbies all jump up and down and shot “again, again!” And, indeed, the clip is shown again in its entirety. It’s astounding! This almost ritualistic format was developed around cognitive psychology studies, and I’d argue that what makes it so precisely appealing to its target audience is the same principal that makes Che so effective. In short, repetition engenders basic comprehension, and this comprehension can then be deepened by the introduction not of foreign elements but of that repetitive pattern itself into new contexts.

Drifting: A Director’s Log: Two more notes about Che

via Ryland Walker Knight’s Google Shared Items

While I’m in Texas for the week, Texan filmmaker (and sometime Spout contributor) David Lowery is in New York, attending Independent Film Week to support his feature St. Nick, which is a product of IFP’s Emerging Filmmaker Labs. He’s writing about his experience for Hammer to Nail, and had some interesting observations about the health of the industry. An excerpt:

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• Glenn Kenny considers that “instant hit”, The Incredible Hulk. “If Edward Norton’s idea, if your idea, if my idea, of an intelligent mainstream genre picture won’t play with the money people, where the hell does that leave anybody’s idea of an intelligent mainstream picture, period?” He raises the issue to Norton himself, but ultimately comes closest to an answer via Jay-Z.
• “It’s not just that there were a lot of black and white movies last year — it’s that most of them were fucking awesome,” writes Rich at FourFour. “Among them: Perspolis, Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain!…Killer of Sheep (a 30+ year-old bit of brilliance that didn’t see official release till last year), I’m Not There, in part (and, my opinion, the b&w parts were the only ones worth watching), and Frank Darabont’s preferred cut of The Mist. But my favorite black-and-white flick of ‘07 and possibly of all time is Control.” What follows is a short treatise on that film’s humanity through black and white cinematography; there are a lot of screencaps.
• “When a filmmaker tells a story in such broads strokes, he or she does so because it allows certain ideas to be explored without exposition; when the scope of a story is already understood, already deeply seated in the audience’s understanding of narrative, those audiences are more perceptible to the details and nuances the filmmaker is able to explore and play with within that structure.” David Lowery considers Silent Light at /Hammer to Nail.

• The subject of today’s Friday Screen Test interview at DVD Panache is film blog hero David Hudson of GreenCine Daily. An excerpt, regarding something he learned from watching movies: “I’m going to have to be a little cryptic…I walked into the film in a state of torment, not even realizing that what was tearing me up was the need to make a decision. When I walked out, I realized that I was facing a choice that hadn’t been clear to me before. And I knew damn well which way I’d have to decide. And, sorry, but I’ll have to leave it at that. I will say, though, that, as is often the case is such situations, the movie wasn’t even a particularly good one!”
• This Vanity Fair chart weirdly lumps Cannes in with a number of summer music events, including Coachella and the “Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.” You’ll have to judge its accuracy for yourself, but I made it through ten days in the South of France without going near a yacht, a bellini nor cocaine. I swear.
• Congratulations are in order for Friends of Spout David Lowery and Dia Sokol, whose feature projects (respectively: St. Nick and Sorry, Thanks; the latter stars another FoS, Wiley Wiggins) have been selected for IFP’s Independent Filmmakers Lab, which means they’ll also make the short list for a new $50,000 grant.

Winner of the SXSW Wholphin Award (and rapturously reviewed for us at the festival by David Lowery), there’s not a single short film on the circuit more eagerly anticipated (by me, at least) than Glory at Sea. As director Benh Zeitlin is still recovering from injuries sustained en route to the film’s SXSW premiere, Sea’s next screening has been postponed until May. But in the meantime, via Twitch, we can watch the trailer. See above.