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Q&A with Ryan J. Sloane and Ariella Mastroianni

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Gazer.

When did you decide to make this project together?
Ariella Mastroianni: Well, Ryan and I, we grew up together. We’ve known each other since high school, and we immediately bonded over films. But we didn’t have anyone in our families who was connected to the arts, so I think that’s why we gravitated towards each other. You know, when you find someone… “you’re my person!” So, yeah, we were always just nerding out about films and we knew that we wanted to work together in some capacity. We just didn’t know when. Or at what point.

Ryan J. Sloane: We’re also very picky. So we didn’t want to, you know… we dabbled with short films – Ariel would always star in my little terrible super eight short films – but, you know, we ended up just getting lost in the shuffle of life, working day jobs that we hated and struggling to pay our bills and get healthcare. I still don’t have it! Haven’t been to the doctor in a minute. But you know, when the pandemic hit, we kind of buckled down and said to ourselves, “listen, this is an opportunity.” I was still working –  I was considered an essential worker, because I was working in a prison –  it was horrible. Um, but, you know, we, we saw this as an opportunity to sit down and actually do this. And we said to ourselves, “nobody’s waiting for us. No one’s going to give us an invitation.” So we were revisiting films that we love, and that we’ve been talking about for years. Everything from, you know, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Antonioni’s Blowup, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, Lee Chang-dong’s Burning… And we were trying to figure out why we were so attracted to these films. And we discovered that these films share a structure called the Spiral Structure. And that was kind of the key that unlocked it. We essentially got into production in April of 2021, and committed to shooting on weekends in April and November for as long as it took, pretty much whenever we had the money.

I’m grateful that we had a team around us who cared as much as we did

What was your writing process like, as co-writers? What was that process like?
RS: Oh gosh. Well, Ariella was furloughed…

AM: Yeah… so I was working at the Angelica Film Center as an assistant at the time. And then when the pandemic hit, I was furloughed. So suddenly I had my days. And Ryan and I have no formal background, like we have no formal training. So the beginning stages were just a lot of research, a lot of studying, and a lot of trial and error. If I recall, that was the good bulk of the beginning. But I would try to write as much as I could in the morning. And then when Ryan came home from working in the prison, we would get together and review where my head was at and then just continue writing together. But that process took about a year and a half. Um, and… you know, Ryan and I would do covers in Atlantic City, singing. And we would do that from 10:00PM to 2:00AM and we would have 30 minute breaks. And on those 30 minute breaks, we would go back into the script and start writing. So the process changed. It evolved. It was a big learning process.

I was struck by the way the port locations play such an important role in the film. Can you discuss the choice to set the film in those places, and what your personal connections, if there are any?
RS: You know, again, being an electrician, I’ve been doing residential electrical work and commercial electrical work since I was like thirteen years old. And I’ve just been around those areas, driving in a truck or going into people’s homes or working in this business or that business, and there’s something voyeuristic about that. You’re constantly watching people, you’re constantly being led into people’s homes and seeing the way they live and the way that they experience life. And I always felt like Jersey was so cinematic. Obviously I’m not the only one. I know Hollywood’s interested in moving there now, too. So it was kind of just like this… it was really important to me, because right now everything’s being gentrified and they’re building these sort of Lego-style apartment buildings, these tiny little boxes and charging people $6,000 to live there. I wanted to capture what was left before it was gone. So that was kind of the rush to get into production by April, 2021. You know, even in terms of the phone booths and the payphones, they’re getting rid of all those. I think they got rid of all them in 2021. We actually had to buy a phone booth! I was the proud owner of a phone booth for a while. And we were lugging that thing around in, in my electrical van, and then it weighed a lot, and then running it across the street on a little hand truck. It was just important to capture what was left of home before it was completely changed and gentrified, you know?

Ryan is credited as the editor, but I get the sense that both of you probably had a hand in that work. Can you discuss your approach?
RS: Yeah, I mean… just to put this in perspective, because we shot on film and we had no money. So it was important that we did a lot of rehearsal and, um, you know, Ariella was coming from a theater background, but I was not. But a lot of the film directors that I love, they all came from theater and I studied the way that they directed and the way that they handled rehearsals and so on. So I approached it in a very similar way, which saved us a lot of money. Ariella had one to two takes throughout the entire film. Because that’s all we could do. Everything was storyboarded. What you see is what we did, to the point where there were certain conversations that I would say “cut,” we’d move the camera, and then we’d start the scene over. I’d tap the DP on the shoulder to start recording in a specific area. We’d get what we need, cut, move on… You know what I mean? Um, and it was. It was detrimental to the process to, to do that, no doubt. Because Ariella’s doing one or two takes and then immediately calling in lunch. Yeah. The we would take a break while we’re loading a magazine and I would go pick up lunch, you know? That was kind of the process that we were going through.

AM: Yes – I got stressed. It was… but you know what, we did this film with a handful of our friends. So even though Ryan and I wore many hats, our friends who worked in the film also wore many hats. You know, our camera department was three people, including Ryan. It was him and our DP and a gaffer. So everyone was running around the whole time. Because like Ryan said, because we were shooting on film, we had limited takes. Everyone, everyone on the set was just really focused. And I’m grateful that we had a team around us who cared as much as we did.

Q&A with Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, and Jay Ellis

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Freaky Tales.

This is a movie that shows real love for the Bay Area. Where did the story come from?
Ryan Fleck: Well, it starts with that Too $hort song, this really nasty song called Freaky Tales that I heard way too young, maybe nine or ten. I grew up with hippie parents. We had Beatles records and Janis Joplin and then my friends played me Freaky Tales and I was like, What is going on?! I became a Too $hort fan—of course, growing up in Oakland, you have to be. And being a ten-year-old kid in ‘87 and hearing that Sleepy Floyd game on the radio where Greg Papa is calling the play-by-play and he says, Sleepy Floyd is Superman, it always meant something to me that the underdog can still pull it off, maybe once. We had no business winning any games in that series against the Lakers.

I had been pitching Anna versions of a movie called Freaky Tales for years, right? Right. Most of them were pretty bad and not worth exploring here, but once we landed on the chapters I think things really opened up creatively.

The specificity creates the universality

Anna, you’re not from the Bay Area, so what drew you to the project?
Anna Boden: Like Ryan said, he’d been pitching me versions that I was not interested in for years. You know, he listened to that song as a ten-year-old boy! Well, he played it for me when I was a woman in my twenties, it did not have the same effect on me. I was not like, oh yeah, we gotta make this movie! I think what opened it up for me was when I started to think about it more from the young women’s point of view and listening to Don’t Fight the Feelin’ and hearing that song. Thinking about that, we created a fictionalization of an idea of how this song might have come to be and that’s what the second chapter is, into the Too $hort part of Freaky Tales and the underdog storyline. That got me excited. Then we started to think about like all these stories as being these underdogs overcoming the bully and that was the theme that pulled us throughout and that felt more universal. It certainly is absolutely 100% a love letter to Oakland and its culture, but it also had something that felt more universal to me.

There is something familiar about these locations and characters and themes that speaks to this specificity, but also this universality. Can you talk about finding that balance between those two?
RF: When we were writing the script, I wrote in all the places that I grew up going to—Loard’s Ice Cream shop, the Oakland Coliseum for sports, and Gilman, of course, Gilman, which I didn’t actually go to because I was afraid of the punk rock scene at that age. But I learned more about it as I got older and had so much admiration and respect for it. That first chapter is the closest we come to a true story in the movie, which is that they were being harassed by neo-Nazi skinheads around ‘87 and they stood up for themselves and they defended themselves and they had a fight out in front of their venue. The locations were key. And the Grand Lake Theater! I grew up going to movies at the Grand Lake, and we got to shoot there, and then we had a big screening there last week and the roof blew off the place. It was amazing.

Jay, you’ve worked with Anna and Ryan in the past. What made you sign onto this film?
Jay Ellis: First of all, getting the opportunity to work with Anna and Ryan. Seeing how they work, I felt super comfortable, and I really enjoyed the process. When this came around and I read the script, I was already in from a relationship standpoint, from a working standpoint. Then I got a chance to read the creative, and my mind was just blown. I couldn’t visualize anything that was on the page! I was like, how does this happen? What, how does he do this? And how do they do that? It was one of the most original things that I had read in a long time, and that got me really excited. I feel like part of my job as an actor is to fall in line with a filmmaker’s vision. I could very much see the vision and I understood that we were going to be dropped in a place in a time. Like you said earlier, specificity creates the universality because we know people like this in all these cities we live in. People who love their team and have their crazy sports moments. I mean, we were just outside talking about how Toronto was dead quiet when the Raptors won that championship because everyone was indoors watching that game. There’s someone in Toronto who will write their version of that game years from now. That specificity in this story really excited me and it was an easy yes.

It’s really interesting the way you treat action and violence in the film. What sort of conversations did you have about that?
AB: We started the movie as very grounded and in a very authentic time and a place, and we took the look from a 16mm doc-style Penelope Spheeris The Decline of Western Civilization style. We wanted it to feel very grounded. And then as soon as that fight starts, we wanted it to explode into another sphere and feel like, pow! You take the two feet that are grounded in reality and then have one of them fly off into outer space. There were little clues earlier, that this film had one foot in reality and another foot a little bit outside of reality. But for the people who hadn’t picked up on those clues, now everyone’s going to know that this is not totally grounded in reality. That came with that first moment of violence with the slingshot in the eye and then the blood splashing on the camera. We wanted it to happen that way because we wanted the violence to be fun and we wanted people to be able to laugh at it. We didn’t want it to really hurt. We wanted the neo-Nazis to get their due and for people to be able to feel cathartic about it, but in a safe way. So we can all applaud and have fun with it. The guy gets burnt, but then he gets back in the car, you know? That design has a bit of a comic book-y playfulness to it, but it’s still gory and bloody at the same time. So not comic book-y in a Marvel kind of way, where we didn’t have any blood, but comic book-y in a very different kind of way where we got to have a lot of blood!

Jay, what’s it like playing a character that is based on someone real, but also a completely different version of him?
JE: Yeah, there’s obviously a fictitious side to his story. Ryan and Anna had sent over a couple interviews and specifically the interview that Sleepy Floyd did during that game or after that game. I remember watching it over and over again and trying to get the tilt of my head right and make sure my mustache was thin enough, and he has this big wide smile. I thought about the mannerisms and the physicality a lot. As we were going through the fight choreography, I pitched Ron [Yuan]—our stunt coordinator—that I wanted to do a crossover because Sleepy has this big crossover in the basketball game. So we do this crossover move and then we kind of work it into the choreography. It was this fun moment of trying to blend Sleepy’s quick, wide crossover into this fictitious side of him where he’s also this martial arts master who has all these weapons.

That was a lot of fun. There’s also this big monologue that I have as I walk down the stairs for the Psytopics commercial, and trying to get into his accent was also a fun thing to think about. I wanted to pay as much honor and respect to him because he has a record that still stands today, but then to also make the character very much my own as well. I feel like I got to do that a lot more on the fictitious side, while still honoring who he is as a person.

Could you talk about the collaboration with your cinematographer in terms of approaching each one of these four distinct stories in different visual ways?
RF: Like Anna said, we wanted that punk chapter to feel like a 4:3 ratio, with a grainy 16mm film look. By the end, we really go into anamorphic widescreen, like a Kung Fu movie or old Western. The path along the middle feels like traditional eighties cinema with some 1:85 aspect ratios. In terms of the colors, we wanted washed out for the first one, and when we get to the ladies in the second chapter, the colors are really popping with them and that was fun. Do you remember the specific conversations we had with Jac [Fitzgerald, Cinematographer]?

AB: We pulled a lot of different references from different films and photography and tried to pinpoint one thing for each chapter. I also remember us really struggling about whether we should go black and white for the third noir chapter, with Clint. But also knowing that none of our eighties references were black and white. We wanted it to have a distinct look, but instead we went distinct from the second chapter by choosing a very different kind of color timing and palette— a different color palette in terms of the clothes and the lighting. We tried to keep it more authentic to what our references were in order to maintain that consistency, even though there was this temptation to make each one look very different!

Q&A with Peter Cattaneo and Steve Coogan

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Penguin Lessons.

When you were first pitched this story, what really clicked for you? Was there a moment or scene that really convinced you that you wanted to make this?
Peter Cattaneo: Well, it’s based on a memoir, and I think what felt really exciting was that you would never dream up this set of facts. It’s a real story in a particular time and place, and there’s this friendship with a penguin: it’s interesting what animals can do to humanize human beings. And then there is this idea of this kind of walled piece of Britain sort of landing like an alien spaceship in the middle of Argentina! It just felt like a really heady mixture to dig into as a filmmaker.

Steve Coogan: When Jeff [Pope] first described the project to me, my initial reaction was, “I don’t want to be in a cute penguin movie. It sounds horrific.” But I talked to him more and more about it. I thought, “well… maybe.” And I thought about how if you don’t want to do something, sometimes that’s a sign that you should do it. And I thought, well, I’m kind of a little cynical, so let’s make him super cynical, a bit more cynical than the real Tom Michelle. Let’s make him someone who doesn’t like penguins or animals and is cynical about his own existence, basically. And then we’ve got a little journey to go on and with the penguin. So at that point I was like, “okay, this sounds like it could be fun.”

What is really brave is to feel the fear and still do the right thing


I understand that the story changed a little bit from the book?
PC: Yes, that’s correct. The Michell in the book was in his mid to late twenties. But the story of the penguin coming to the school as kind of a catalyst for good and hope was very much in the book. There was only a little bit of the political situation, but of course the truth is that wall around the school did keep it quite protected from what was going on outside. So the key things that developed from the book to the screen were making him older, and making the political element more prominent. The politics felt like they were sort of underserved in the book, and it felt very difficult to do a film set in Argentina in 1976 without building that out more. Like, we either needed to change the time period, or we had to deal with it. And then of course we’re not saying it’s an in-depth study of all sides of that conflict. Of course it’s not. We just felt we couldn’t make a film which didn’t at least deal with it in some way.

Did having so much professional experience with the screenwriter allow you to have conversations with him that you wouldn’t normally be able to have as you were preparing the role?
SC: Yes, absolutely. Because I’ve written several films with Jeff, and I always meddle with what he’s done. I mean, I’m going to be saying the stuff that he’s written, and so we just… by our very nature, we sort of collaborate that way.

PC: It was kind of exciting because I love the work those guys had done together before, and it was funny just to overhear them saying stuff that you wouldn’t normally hear between an actor and a writer, like, “no, that’s shit.” Things like that!

SC: Well, the thing is when, when you know someone really well… I know Jeff well enough that I don’t… it can save a lot of time. Because normally, when you’re trying to tell someone that you don’t like something that they’ve done, you have to do a dance around the politics of it so you don’t get canceled for bullying them. Whereas Jeff and I just say, “that’s crap.” And, and we know each other so well that we don’t take it personally. We just sort of say, “that’s terrible. I don’t like that.” “Why?” “Because of this.”

Did you anticipate how relevant this story would be to the time it’s being released?
PC: No, not at all. We were just talking about that. I think being European, and having my parents who lived through… my dad left Italy to get away from fascism. So I think we are very aware. Personally, my fascism radar is very, very hot. Um, so suddenly, yeah, it feels quite relevant to what’s going on, and not just here, it’s globally. But yes, that’s coincidence, really.

SC: I think the thing that resonates with me right now is the importance of not being cynical. It’s so easy to feel this cynicism in the face of a nihilistic world… it’s quite an easy place to live in, to wash your hands of it all and just not engage. I mean, I’m, I’m as guilty of it as anyone else: I’m just going to check out, which is what my character is doing in the film, when we first meet him. But then he is humbled by young people who have a conscience. That was key, I think. Just the notion of, you know, that you can’t save the world, but you can be nice to the people you meet. You can try and make a difference within your vicinity, within your immediate world. You can make a difference. You can choose to be cruel or kind at certain times in your life. And that will have some sort of ripple effect. We usually think of bravery as being bullish and not feeling fear. But to me, that doesn’t seem to be real strength of character. What is really brave is to feel the fear and still do the right thing. That is the noblest thing I think a human being can do is do – the right thing, even though it might seem futile.

Q&A with Gints Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Flow.

What is it like finally bringing a film into the world after you’ve been working on it for close to five years?

Gints Zilbalodis: Well, I finished the film like days before going to Cannes. It was a very stressful few weeks get it to the finish line. And I hadn’t even seen it with an audience, only with the team, which is not a very objective audience. It’s been very intense, and very strange, sitting in a room by yourself for such a long time and then going to twenty or thirty places and meeting crowds of people. But it’s cool. And it’s being distributed widely. I think it’s the most widely distributed Latvian film, which we’re very happy about.

Matiss Kaza: We’re very proud that this movie can represent Latvian and Baltic Cinema on a larger scale because these countries are sometimes ignored by the bigger festivals. That’s because they don’t have like something like a wave associated with them, like Romania had in the 2000s or something like that. What we’re hoping for is that this will be the first of many films from the Baltics to get noticed internationally. I hope that this can start a new movement in that direction and that people will pay attention to movies from our region. And for me, it’s the first animated film I produced and co-wrote, so everything is new. But that’s what’s interesting. And we’ve made some mistakes along the way, but now we know what not to do next time!

The animals need to have agency

If you made mistakes, I didn’t see any. It’s remarkable that it’s your first animation. Tell us more about that.

MK: My experience before this film was mostly live action and documentary films—directing, writing, and producing. Gints initially asked me to come on board this project as a co-writer. We worked on the script, and he initially didn’t trust me to produce this film because I’d only produced live action and documentary, and animation is something different. And it is different in the sense that, for example, live action features are extremely chaotic and hectic for the shooting period of maybe thirty or forty days if you’re lucky, right? Whereas this is very calm, but very long. It’s five years, but you can always go back and change something or tweak it if it doesn’t work.

GZ: It’s not at all calm.

MK: Well at the end it wasn’t, but for the most part of the five years it was very calm.

GZ: For you, maybe!  

I read some interviews that you’ve done and it’s remarkable that everybody, it seems, has this desire to interpret the film for you or to hear your interpretation of the film. And I understand that there’s no dialogue, no humans, it’s a cryptic piece in some ways. And I’m wondering how you as filmmakers react when people ask you those questions?

GZ: Yeah, I guess it’s a little bit like asking a comedian to explain why a joke is funny. I often try to explain not the meaning, but how these scenes came together and my intention. I do like to leave some things open. It’s very interesting that some people are very sure that it’s about a certain thing. I never say that it’s not; I allow them to think that. It’s ambiguous because there were certain things that I didn’t care as much about. The things I care about and wanted to focus on are quite clear and definitive, which are the characters and the relationships. I didn’t want to explain the backstory, I didn’t want to waste time doing that, or leaving the cat’s perspective, which would maybe be required to explain certain things. It was important to stay in the cat’s subjective point of view, because the cat doesn’t know where the people went or where the flood came from. That’s where I wanted the audience to be.  

Matiss, as a producer, how is it different talking about the project now than how it was years ago.

MK: Well, now we can show a lot. Back then we had limited material to show. We had the development teaser, and afterwards we had an animatic, but that is also not true to what the final film is. But this is a film that’s better to experience firsthand than to have to listen to someone describe it. When I talk about it now, there’s lots of stuff I can reference. There are also fun anecdotes that I can talk about from the production process because of the unusual approach to a film about animals. In the sense that, it’s kind of opposed to say the Pixar or DreamWorks style of having animals walk on two legs, talk, dance, and sing. There are a few anecdotes that go with creating a movie where the animals behave like animals. They’re semi-anthropomorphized, of course, but still behaving mostly like animals. The French co-producer had to pay people to watch cat videos to do research for the film. And capybara videos! Because many of the shots use footage of animal behavior to make it more naturalistic. And then of course, there’s the story of voicing the animals. Gints, maybe you want to share that fun anecdote?

GZ: There are real animal voices. We didn’t use humans mimicking animals. Our sound designer would try to record his cat. And his cat would actually talk a lot, but whenever he pointed the microphone towards the cat, he would get self-conscious. Such a cat. He had to hide microphones in his closet. It’s interesting because cats actually have different voices. We couldn’t use different cats—they’re very distinctive. For the most part, it’s one cat. Also, with the capybara, our sound designer tried to make it vocalize something, but they’re very silent. So they had to tickle the capybara to make some noise. But that was a very unpleasant sound. It was a very high pitched, kind of anxious voice, which didn’t fit this character. That’s an example where we had to take some artistic liberties. And we cast a different animal! It’s actually a camel that’s voicing the capybara. Sometimes if you represent reality exactly as it is, it can take you out of the moment. Sometimes fiction can be more real than reality.

He sounded just like I thought he would! You guys had to tickle a capybara? Where can we watch this footage?

GZ: I don’t know, it was in France.

MK: See, that’s one of the mistakes we’re going to not make! We’re going to have a lot of behind the scenes footage for the next one.

I love watching the film because I never feel that there’s a rigid set of rules about how the animal must do things. Did you have any internal compass about how they’re going to act compared to real life animals?

GZ: We didn’t have any rules for that. I thought in the beginning of the film that they should act in a rather naturalistic way. And that’s a word that we used, naturalism rather than realism, which means that we’re not copying real life, we’re interpreting it and kind of telling a story. But as the story grows, we gradually have to have them make decisions, because the way we understand these characters is through the behavior and the decisions they make. The animals need to have agency. They can’t just stay in the boat. I wanted them to have complicated decisions where there’s no easy answer.

We also did look at similar situations where they might push something or behave in a similar way. Even for small moments. We would look for references of them just turning their heads or the ear movements. I didn’t know that cats actually don’t move their eyes a lot. They just look around with their heads, and they might just turn their ears, which can be very expressive. We’re telling a story, a personal story, so the behavior of the animals starts out with them being kind of archetypical, or kind of the stereotypical. You’ve got the happy dog and the grumpy cat, and that’s how I start, but then I try to break the stereotype and have them act in contradictory ways, which makes them more interesting. I wanted each of them to be relatable as well, and hopefully they’re flawed in their own way, but there are no antagonists. There are only flawed characters.

Except for that one bird!

GZ: Yeah, but even the bird was just trying to protect its little bird.

This is your second feature, but the first film you’ve done with such a large crew. Can you talk about making that leap?

GZ: It was intentional to tell a story about that experience of me figuring out how to work together, but we wrote the story before production. There was a lot of anxiety, and I was predicting a lot more conflict than we actually ended up with. The process was much smoother than what we see on the screen with the characters fighting and arguing. They say write what you know, but I thought I should write something that I was going through at that time. It’s not something in the past. I had to figure out how to articulate my thoughts, because before I could just have an idea and visualize it myself. This time I had to find words, which can be helpful in making it more intentional. But it also can be tricky because I tried to avoid over explaining certain things. In certain moments, I had to ask the crew to trust me that it’s going to work when we put the music in and when it’s animated. But I can’t really explain certain things. There are certain moments where it was easier for me just to show my intention. We didn’t have storyboard artists, and I designed the shots myself. In those cases, it’s easier and faster just to show rather than explain it to someone else because, also, sometimes I didn’t know what I wanted. It’s a process of discovery. I have to try different things and see if it works. I can’t explain certain things which I don’t know myself. That’s also why I’m doing the music. Because music is so subjective—it could be interpreted very, very differently. I do the music while writing the script, which kind of gives me ideas for the story. But then we brought on another composer, Rihards Zalupe, who has a lot more experience than me and added more layers to the score.

But it was nice not worry about the technical aspects as much as I used to, since we could delegate to other animators. And there are many things that I couldn’t do myself, like the water, which technically is really complicated. It’s for people much smarter than me.

Q&A with Bong Joon Ho

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Mickey 17.

This is a wonderfully imaginative film that has so much to say. Can you talk about your adaptation process?

Bong Joon Ho: So I first read a ten page treatment of the novel, and I was just immediately fascinated by the concept of human printing. I had this desire to continuously print out an actor that you kind of feel sorry for! The concept of “human printing,” it’s like two words that should never really be combined. Printing out human beings as if they are pieces of paper…and already the idea encompasses so many different sorts of emotional and ethical issues. And so I started thinking what would it be like, for me to be printed out? What would it be like to watch someone that I love or know get printed out from this printer? I found it quite sad and funny. So before thinking of it as a sci-fi tale, I found it to be a very human story where you can almost smell the pit stains of the characters in that world, and that’s what I was trying to go for, which is why I changed a lot from the novel. In the original novel, Mickey’s character, he’s more of an intellectual. He’s a historian. And with Timo (played by Steven Yeun), he’s more of this, like, popular hotshot guy. But I wanted Timo to be more of a grifter from the streets, and I wanted to bring everyone down to reality and even make the timeline closer to our own.

I think we all have a 17 inside of us

Can you talk about the design of the ship? There is a sort of central bubble where the working class exists, and there is a whole different section for those in control.

BJH: So the production designer and I talked a lot about how when you go to these luxurious department stores and hotels, everything seems fancy and sleek. But the minute you open the door to the employee-only places, then you see pipes hanging from the ceilings and the floors are rough, and the atmosphere of this space changes instantly. And most of the ship, I guess, is the staff-only place. Marshall and Ylfa’s rooms are the only exception in the spaceship: for them, it’s opulent, and you see these weird art pieces displayed. And everyone else has these dingy rooms that are like those staff-only places. And then you have Ylfa making her sauces in her luxury rooms!

Was that an invention on your part? Where did that come from, about the sauces?

BJH: In the novel, we only have Marshall. So the character of Ylfa is a creation that I added, and I added her because, you know, historically we’ve seen dictators move as couples and they feel even more ridiculous and more horrifying when we see them do that. Kind of like the Ceaușescu couple from Romania back in the day.

Of course reprinting oneself is a crazy act and it requires an incredibly versatile actor to pull off, like Robert Pattinson. Can you talk about developing the characters of Mickey 17 versus Mickey 18?

BJH: I think we all have a 17 inside of us where, you know, sometimes we get taken advantage of, and we kind of miss that perfect moment to get angry… kind of like how 17 says thanks for dinner after he’s been horribly abused. We say the wrong things. And so all of that pent up anger is just kind of inside. And in those situations, I think a lot of people, including myself, we imagine what it would be like to have a twin, like an 18 who just comes out and beats up the bad guys for you, who screams at all the people who made you angry. And you know, 18 is kind of the manifestation of that desire that we all have.

I know you do editing while you are on the set, which is very different from how movies are made in Europe and America. Can you discuss that approach?

BJH: So it is pretty standard in Korea to have an onset editor, perhaps because we’re so impatient, we just need to see you right as we’re shooting! We want to know right away how it would cut, and when international actors see it for the first time, they’re all a bit… disoriented and surprised, but they quickly get used to it and they’re constantly coming to me saying, “oh, can I see what we shot yesterday?” And with this sort of temporary cut, they get to see how their performances and the tone connects, and how the movie is coming to life.

You’re known for not doing much coverage, and for editing on set. Are you able to do that because you’re so familiar with the story and the script that you can see every shot and every cut? How are you approaching the visual language and shot progression?

BJH: So it’s not that I construct all the shots as I’m writing the script, I only have sort of key images in my mind. For the storyboard to be actually applicable and practical, you kind of have to have all the locations and spaces constructed and confirmed first. So after the sets are designed and locations are confirmed, I start doing the actual storyboards and determining the camera position and the tracking, and I do it myself. And that’s how I avoid shooting coverage. Sometimes editors who have never worked with me before, they find it a bit boring, because they feel like there’s not a lot of room to play around in the editing. But no matter how tight the storyboarding and the shots are, there’s always room to play around with things in the edit. With Mickey 17, I worked with the editor Jinmo Yang, and it’s my third time working with him. We also did Okja, Snowpiercer, and Parasite together. So even if I don’t have coverage, he always finds room and feels quite free to do his edits. That was true for this film particularly with the vaccine sequence, when they first arrive on the planet and Mickey’s exposed to the virus in the atmosphere. And he becomes this lab rat dying for the vaccine test. With that montage in particular, it’s really Jin’s work. It’s quite different from the storyboard. I just kind of let him do what he wanted.