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Q&A with Austin and Meredith Bragg

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game.

I want to start out by talking about how you got the idea to do this. How do you collaborate to come up with this incredible work that we just saw?
Meredith Bragg: We’re not entirely sure where we first learned that pinball was illegal in many cities, and that there was this man in 1976 with this insane mustache who helped legalize it in New York City. The idea sat on a Google doc that we have just full of embryonic ideas. And we… cold-emailed Roger. I’ll do this occasionally. I’ll just cold-email people who I think I may want to pull the thread of a story that may may be interesting. And I, I got on the phone with him for about three hours, and when I was done, I texted Austin and said I think this might be a feature because he had told us about all of the other things that were happening. We’re not pinball people. But I had read enough about the story before I talked to him that I sort of knew the basics of what was happening at the time. But he told us about GQ, about Ellen and about Seth, about writing the book. He was very candid, very early on about who he felt like he was when he first got to New York and who he became around the time of this sort of first scene. Pinball is a very selfish thing: he just wanted a machine for himself and he didn’t care about anything else. And then through the process of writing a book and opening up and meeting these people, he felt he felt like he wanted to be in the game. And so that was that was the genesis, I think. And then we pitched it with a number of other ideas to MPI films, and they initially pitched it with a number of other film concepts. They had told us no biopics, no period pieces, because this is going to be a tier zero film. So a low budget entity. But they gravitated towards it just as much as we did. And we proceeded to spend, cumulatively, days on Zoom with Roger, because this was during covid… early covid: I had emailed him in February 2020. So we we spent a lot of time with him, with Alan and Seth, with James, the photographer, with other people around who knew Roger or knew GQ or things around that time… and out of all that came this!

We end up creating something that’s much better than I think one of us could do alone.

Can you talk a bit about how you collaborate, as co-directors and co-writers?
Austin Bragg: Oh, it’s awful. We have, I think, what is probably one of the more inefficient writing processes you’ll find. I say this because both of us will walk away after we have come up with our basic outline and write an entire script independently. And then we will sit down with a physical copy and hand it to the other person with our stack of highlighters. So I will take Meredith’s script and he will take mine and we will go through and highlight all the things that they did better than me, write everything that Meredith did better than me. I will highlight and I’ll grumble a little bit because it’s still a competition. And then we’ll actually trade it back. And so I now have my original scripts with all the things that he highlighted, and I will go in with a different highlighter and highlight all of the things that Meredith didn’t realize were brilliant.And after we’ve done that process, then we fight. And depending on how close together the scripts are and when our deadline is, sometimes we do that again, and sometimes we’ll go immediately into creating a single hybrid version. Again, not an efficient process by any means, but so far it seems to be working for us and it gives us a little bit of an out, right? When something is not working; when I hit a scene and I’m stuck, or I just don’t like what I’ve done. There’s a good chance that Meredith has already figured out, and vice versa. If both of us have stumbled at the same point, then usually that means there’s something wrong with our outline, right? That there’s something wrong with the structure of it that we have to go back and address. So, not a great process, but that’s where we are.

Meredith Bragg: Yeah, we we outline heavily before we do this so that it’s not so we’re not diverging greatly. I mean, occasionally you’ll diverge in the writing process. You may, as you combine a scene or something just to get things smooth. But most of the time we know, okay, we’re going from this scene to this scene to this scene, so we can play around within that scene and not break the whole story. So it becomes… that highlighting becomes sort of, “oh, I want to steal that from what Austin did…” or, “I really like that line,” or, “I like that scene description,” or, “you know… that is a funny way to get into the scene, and it’s better than what I did.” So when we get the chance, it’s always great to steal the other person’s good ideas and then try another draft as often as we can. We do that, and we end up creating something that’s much better than I think one of us could do alone.

Did you actually have a pinball machine with you, as you were writing? Did you spend a lot of time playing, and did you find that helpful, if you did?
AB: So neither of us own a pinball machine, but we did – through Roger and some connections – we met up with Joe Said, so he runs an arcade in Maryland called Spinners Pinball Arcade, and we actually brought our families to Spinners in the middle of lockdown and, you know, bought the place out for a few hours so our kids could run around and play games… and we went into the back where the first thing I saw was a giant “Sharpshooter” machine, which is that machine with Roger as the cowboy. And we talked to Joe for a while about the machines, and everything about the maintenance of the machines, and all of the inner workings. He actually he let us walk home with a playfield, just the top playfield and some pinballs – a little tube of pinballs. And we took them to Meredith’s place and set up our camera and started playing around with, you know, how to film inside these machines in a way that, you know, we weren’t going to have time to mess around once you were on set. We knew that. So we had it in our head how exactly we wanted to get it through shooting, but we still don’t have pinball machines. We threatened to, but our wives, I don’t think like that very much. These are loud machines!

Is it hard to be a pinball wizard?

AB: It’s impossible. I mean, we’ve been on the circuit with Roger, and Roger’s in his seventies now, and, you know, he’ll tell you that he’s not the player he used to be. You know, it’s insane watching him play. In fact, some of the shots that you see in the film are Roger. Because we need somebody who can hit that shot on the pinball machine, you know, with a camera right in his face, and him down in a weird angle. He’ll do it in one, right? It would take me all day.

MB: We were told that real pinball players would know just by the spin of the ball, whether you’re throwing it or whether there’s a magnet underneath pushing it. And we knew we didn’t… we wanted to make a movie that the pinball community could embrace, but that anyone could watch. That wasn’t just… there’s been a lot of documentaries that the pinball community has embraced. But they’re very much geared for that community. We wanted something with wider appeal, but so one of the things we did is we said, “well, we’ve got to actually have someone making these shots.” And we didn’t have the time to set up a shot and insert and try twenty times and hit it once. So Roger happened to be on set that day and we thought, “Roger, come on over here.” So there are these great photos, behind the scenes photos, of this camera set up, this huge rig, and Roger’s just sort of somehow gotten his body in a position where he can hit it, and he just nails it. It was… he’s really, really good. We did a newscast hit – where was that? And Roger and I were on local news and they had set up a pinball machine there. And so they wanted to start playing as a teaser. So he starts playing. And then the commercials are done, and they’re back with us. He has to… he basically has to lose on purpose because he’s still playing that first ball! After you know, ninety seconds, or two minutes or whatever. So, I mean, he’s excellent. Whereas if we were doing it, the whole entire game would be done in about twenty seconds.

Q&A with Andrea Pallaoro, Trace Lysette, and Patricia Clarkson

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

Andrea, this is your third feature and a lot of your films have been led by women. I’d love to hear how you developed the script.
Andrea Pallaoro: Well, it’s a film that I had envisioned as part of a much larger exploration on the traumas and the dynamics of what it means to feel abandoned and the consequences of that. I really believe that the experience of abandonment, of not being seen, of not being recognized for who you are, is something that shapes so much of our relationship with the world around us, but also with our own sense of identity. And I think it’s something that we can all relate to in one way or another. Through the story of Monica, I think we can recognize ourselves through a much more extreme paradigm. But we can see so much of who we are and what we have experienced as well. That was really the main impulse for that in this story, and it’s really inspired by the story of a very dear friend of mine. It’s not her story, but it draws a lot of parallels with it.

Finding the truth is what we always want to do.

The role of Monica is a massive undertaking as she’s in almost every scene in the film, and she’s the conduit for the audience. What was the casting process like?
AP: It was clear that the most significant choice I could make was in finding the person that could bring this character to life. You know, the person I could actually embark on this journey with. And it was a very, very long process. I saw so many candidates for the role. And it was a search that wasn’t limited to the U.S., but expanded all over the world. When I met Trace, I immediately knew I had found who I was looking for. I found the person that had the all the characteristics to bring this person to life on the screen. That was the first time I felt like, oh, my God, yes. Now we’re talking.

And Patricia was always in the back of my mind because we had met a few years prior at a film festival in Marrakesh., I was such a big fan of her work. And her career and the characters that she brought to the big screen. It’s always been a dream of mine to work with her. But it’s one of those things that, you know, you think they’re just dreams. You don’t expect them to actually become reality. Even though when we were in Marrakesh, we did talk about how wonderful it would be to work together one day. Once we cast Trace, I sent the script to Patty and offered her the role, and the rest is history.

What was it that convinced you so quickly to accept the role of Eugenia?
Patricia Clarkson: So many different things. The lack of dialogue, the challenge of conveying a dying character with very little words. And also, it was not lost on me that it would give an extraordinary transgender actress an extraordinary opportunity. And that meant something to me.

Trace, what were your first impressions of the script and the character of Monica?
Trace Lysette: Well, I think the first thing was that, oh, it’s the title character and that’s rare for trans actor. And I had been working in TV for ten years, for a while. It seemed like a great opportunity. Then I read the script, and I loved it. Those things that Andrea described earlier, I felt similarly. I started auditioning and eventually they asked for some notes. I gave some notes. We had some dinners. I auditioned more. My favorite thing about Monica was her quiet strength and knowing that this was a well-lived trans character—not a transition story. It was not a story about youth, no shade! This is a woman who has lived on her own for a long time without the love from her biological family. And that’s a theme that is unfortunately common in the trans community. I think we all experience it to varying degrees. If you don’t, you’re lucky. And that was what struck me the most about her.

I imagine as an actor it’s a privilege if the director actually wants notes and wants your input. But also as a director, if you have somebody who’s lived a character that you haven’t lived, it’s probably also a privilege to have that input.
AP: Absolutely. It’s the most extraordinary opportunity for the creative process, to be informed by the real life. I always want my collaborators to bring that to the work.

TC: I think the collaboration was wonderful. I mean, I felt safe with Andrea, and he’s a very gentle artist, a gentle person. That made me feel safer to explore and to act and to bring the truth. Finding the truth is what we always want to do.

PC: I didn’t have any notes. I just said, oh God, I’m dying. And I’m going to have no makeup on and have no words. I can’t wait! No, it was one of the most glorious, most extraordinary experiences I’ve had in my career. And it’s so near and dear to my heart, this film. I was lucky.

Was there anything that changed in the script after you two met?
AP: Well, yes, absolutely. Even in the production process there were a lot of moments where it was immediately clear to me that Trace’s own experiences and how she saw the character were going to provide even more depth to the character that I had envisioned. And there are a number of moments in the film where her improvisation really surprised me and elevated the material so much. I am thinking especially about the conversations on the phone with Jimmy. With most of them, there was of course very specific information to convey. But most of those conversations actually were improvised.

TL: It’s like a hybrid. Yes.

Patricia, your character doesn’t have a lot of dialogue or a lot of movement in the film.  But you do an amazing job of conveying and communicating while lying in that bed, with your facial expressions. How challenging is that?
PC: I think it’s an organic process in that there wasn’t a lot of okay, you’re going to have this and that and you’re going to be this way. You’re it. It started to oddly come to me. I knew that brain cancer may take you in many ways, but what was most important was the emotional life of this woman. That was first and foremost. Yes, she’s debilitated. Yes, she’s immobile. All of those things are very important. She’s dying. She’s in the last months of her life. But what was most important was her emotional life. And it is the most important part of an actor’s journey with any character you play. Finding that with Trace, which came very easily, was a win-win. I didn’t have to reach. I loved that this character in the last months of her life had this profound experience of finding unconditional love for her child. She dies with that in her heart and her child lives the rest of her life with her mother’s love. We can all relate to that in some way.

AP: I have to add to that because to me, the best moments of cinema are where you can understand a character just by observing them. And without the aid of dialogue, those moments have so much power and let you understand things not so much intellectually, but emotionally. When you work with extraordinary artists like Trace and Patricia, the opportunities to do that and to find those moments happen daily.

Can you talk about choosing the aspect ratio?
AP: We wanted to find a cinematic language that could articulate the sense of claustrophobia and codependence that I wanted to explore through the character of Monica. We explored the various aspect ratios and compositions, and we realized that the one that would convey these emotions and that would enhance this exploration was a very square like aspect ratio. More like portrait photography and one that prioritizes the body and the face over the landscape.

How did you work with your DP, and for the actors, what was it like to be shot so intimately?
AP: Kate [Arizmendi] is an artist with a capital A. It was very exciting to dissect images during the two months of pre-production when we might spend like eight or nine hours a day on location exploring the space, thinking about what each scene and each shot needed to needed to convey. It was really a process of shooting the film in our minds and preparing ourselves for that cinematic language so that when we got to set we felt really sure of that exploration and we were open to new possibilities. But in order to feel that that openness, you need to do the homework and be ready for it.

TL: It was challenging at times. I love Kate. She’s probably the most vocal DP I’ve ever worked with in my career. We found our groove and I appreciated her artistry. We didn’t shoot in sequence and watching it back the first cut, I thought, oh, if I’d known they were going to be on the corner of my lip in this shot, I would have done this instead because I’m trying to layer the character and showcase different parts of her over the course of the film. And what I realized is I didn’t have control over that at all! And so that was something I had to experience and learn while doing this. My road map for the character was different from Kate’s, different from Andrea’s, but it’s incredible how it all comes together at the end, like a true collaboration.

PC: I didn’t know when I was on camera or not and I didn’t care. I mean, I did but I didn’t. I would go into that weird place when I get on the set, where I didn’t know where the camera was and it was maybe for the best. As long as my dog was in frame, that’s all I needed to know!  It was very freeing for me as an actor.

Q&A with Melissa Barrera, Nicholas Britell, and Benjamin Millepied

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

Did you find it helpful to engage with the previous iterations of the story when you were preparing for this film?
Nicholas Britell: Well, what was interesting, actually, was that when Benjamin first told me that he had this inspiration to to do Carmen, my first instinct was that I actually didn’t want to adapt or rearrange Bizet at all. And I was obviously familiar with the opera. Benjamin and I talked extensively about things like the Pushkin epic poem and and the inspirations for libretto. But I also thought it was really important to follow Benjamin’s instinct for this; you know, there have been so many incredible adaptations of Carmen over the years in so many different guises, and that I felt strongly that if Benjamin is going to do this musically, I wanted it to be something completely different.

Melissa Barrera: I would say the same for myself. I didn’t want to… There’s just been so many iterations of this story that I didn’t want to subconsciously copy it, if I watched other things. So I stayed away from everything. I was familiar with the opera, but not enough. Like, I didn’t know anything other than I think Habanera, and I don’t… like, I don’t think I knew the music of the opera very well; I’d never seen it. But… it has such a big presence in Latin America. In Mexico, where I grew up, there was a commercial for soap, like cleaning soap, that used the Habanera song and changed the lyrics for that, for the soap. So it’s just been present for me, for a long time. I know that it’s huge and I know the the Carmen character, the essence of it. So I just wanted her to be mine.

talking about the film and the process makes me want to get back on set as soon as possible.

Can you describe the process you went through to prepare these dances?
MB: Yeah, it was getting comfortable with the dances enough that I didn’t have to think about the steps when I was in there, so that I could focus on the storytelling and what she’s feeling as she’s dancing, more than like, “Oh, did I do the right step? Did I turn the right way?” So it was just like drilling it well.

Benjamin Millepied: Yeah, I think it’s so impressive, particularly in the in the dance with all the other women, because you see Melissa dancing with all these professional dancers. And yet I find that your dancing is freer, you know, than all of them, which was really incredible, you know? Yeah. Really amazing sequence, considering she doesn’t take dance classes at all!

MB: Well, I have a funny story about that! I was mortified at one point, because Benjamin went out to Australia and started sending me videos that he was choreographing with these professional dancers, with the Sydney Dance Company dancers, the best dancers in all of Sydney. And he would send me videos and I’d be freaking out because I was like, “I’m not going to be able to do that. How do you expect me to do that?” If you’re choreographing with professional dancers and I get there and there’s this dance in the desert where I’m dancing with five of those girls and I’m in the middle… and I was like, “How am I going to look better than these girls?” So that was the dance that I think had me the most worried. We were shooting that and it was raining that day and we kept having to stop because our lights, you know, there was thunder, and for safety. And so I was just losing my mind in the trailer because I just wanted to get it over with, and finally it stopped raining. And I was like, “I’m going to slip because the floor is wet… I’m going to slip and fall.” And it was a oner as you can see. I don’t know if you noticed, but the the camera in that sequence doesn’t cut. It’s like one continuous take where you you can’t hide in a oner. It’s kind of… and when you cut, you can cut if someone made a mistake, you cut out of that scene and you use one where you didn’t. But for this it was… I knew it was going to be a oner and I was so nervous about that. We did a take, and then we did another one, and and Benjamin cuts, and he comes to me and he’s like, “How did you do that?” And I said, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “How did you… how did you do that? That was so good. You were flying.” I was like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” I kind of just had an out-of-body experience. I’m glad you liked it because I don’t know what happened! And so it was kind of like one of those magical moments where everything kind of just… it was the pressure of like, we don’t have much time. It’s about to be sunrise. We have to get this done. It doesn’t stop raining. And I think it all kind of worked out for the best.

The movie looks great, but it also sounds incredible. One of the most remarkable thing about the dance sequences is how much in the foreground the shuffling of feet and the breathing of the actors is. How early on was that part of your idea? Did you compose with that in mind?
NB: I mean, and I can say a lot about the sound. We had an incredible sound team, led by Niv Adiri, who’s a genius, and and actually one of the first people that I remember recommending to Benjamin was Niv, because I felt… for something that was really intended to be a, you know, a visual and aural experience, I wanted to make sure that the sound and the sound mix was really, really special. But, you know, as far as the the dances and the music, the on-camera music, that was something that Benjamin and I started talking about literally, you know, I mean, it might have been like ten years ago! Actually, I found an email from Benjamin from ten years ago that said, “I want I want to make Carmen.” Yeah, but it was, you know, it was a long process actually, to figure out all the on camera music. It started with just us talking about things and feeling… trying different experiments, I would say. And then we brought on these incredible collaborators: Julieta Venegas and Taura Stinson and The D.O.C., and that’s really when the songs kind of took their their shape, I think. And I was really curious myself, like, how they were going to look. Because I remember… Benjamin is so trusting and supportive as a director, of his crew. And I remember in particular with The D.O.C., that final huge, you know, rapping fight match that that happens. I remember saying to myself, “you know, I wonder if Benjamin’s going to want a lot of changes in it?” Because this is such a complex choreography. Like I can’t imagine. And and when he listen to it, he just said, “This is great. We’re there.” And I was like, okay, great. And I remember doing it and he shot it. And it’s what we wrote beforehand, you know, and I think that’s such a fascinating testament to Benjamin that he was able to, you know, he worked with this piece and crafted this whole sequence in a film right around that. And it’s true to the film and it’s true to the song. And I remember thinking to myself, that was really kind of remarkable that he were able to take this song and turn it into a whole scene.

This is an incredible challenge to take on, for your directorial debut.
BM: You know, I have to say in hindsight, like I just loved the process of the day-to-day. Like every day on set something goes wrong, and every day you show up, you’ve got to be pragmatic and actually embrace these issues. They’re there. They’re just issues that push you to be more creative. And frankly, I don’t mind it at all. I enjoyed it. I really… talking about the film and the process makes me want to get back on set as soon as possible. No, it’s… it’s really… you have to solve things every day, every day stuff for different reasons. And you have to find solutions. And if you surround yourself really well, you’ll have other people who will find good solutions for you. And what it forces you to do is try to go to the essential and actually strip away what you don’t need. But what is the essential stuff? And how can you figure that out, and do it with less and less time and less, you know? So it’s a fantastic process. I mean, I think maybe I particularly thrive on, like, restraint and how to be creative with restraint. So I just really loved it.

MB: We were… I just want to tell this story because we were you know, always running against the clock — as you usually are in movies, unless you’re like, you know, a big director that has all the time and money in the world to make a movie. But but for the most part, you’re rushing and trying to get things in with the light that you have, or so that you don’t have to do a forced call or whatever. So you’re always kind of tense. And Ben always would release that tension, because every time that we would be in between setups, he’d play awesome music over the speakers. So there was always music playing, and everyone was so relaxed because of it. But then also, when we were shooting the dance in the desert — the final sequence in the sunset — we had like a thirty or forty minute window to shoot that sequence, because the light was just right for that amount of time. And and we were in a red sand desert where the camera needed to see in 360. There was a limited crew because we had like a tiny little tent because the camera had to see all the way around. Base camp was thirty minutes away so that the camera could see the entire, you know, desert. And we had to dance, and then clean the dirt so that you didn’t see the footsteps of the previous take. And so it would be like a whole reset of that. You know, the crew would be sweeping, and Ben would grab a broom and sort of sweep and dance in between setups. And that is just like the definition of who Ben is as a director, just like… Joy and teamwork. And generosity and all the best things. It was such an amazing experience.

Q&A with Kelly Reichardt

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

How did you go from making First Cow to telling a story like Showing Up?
Kelly Reichardt: Well, both films were written with Jonathan Raymond and we started out with this idea of making a film of this little-known Canadian painter, Emily Carr. We wanted to focus on a ten-year period of her life when she was a landlord. She had sort of bought this building and become a landlord because she thought it would give her more time away from day jobs and leave to more time to paint. And then we took the ferry to Vancouver and we learned that she was a hugely famous painter in Canada. Do you guys know Emily Carr? She’s huge in Canada.

It’s true! I’m Canadian. She’s huge! There’s a school named after her, right?

KR: Yeah, there’s an art school. And we stayed at the Emily Carr hotel. But you don’t hear as much about her here in the states. It’s like saying you’ve never heard of Norman Rockwell. There are statues of her up. She’s amazing. But we didn’t want to make a film about a famous painter! We came back closer to our own world and started focusing on artists we knew that were working in areas we knew. There was this school, Oregon College of Arts and Crafts, which is an art school. You don’t get a BA or anything. It’s purely art on the docket. Those types of schools have been closing down around America and this school which is like 105 years old had also shuttered its doors. It’s a really important institution for people doing pottery and crafts in the Pacific Northwest. We wanted to film in this place before it ceased to exist, and because of Covid we were able to do that.

Pottery has a lot of inside politics!

Can you talk about recreating that environment?
KR: It was pretty cool because it was completely empty and so I went there with the art director and we measured out the rooms and made a big floor plan. I had that in my apartment and we got to make up what the school would be. There were some clues in some of the rooms like, okay, there are sinks, so that’s the dye room. And then one of the first times that I visited the school, there was a giant loom. I mean, a giant loom that would take up this whole wall. But then that disappeared. Things were just kind of being moved out of the school. And another art facility gave us the rooms to use. We were just making up what this school would be. I’d been teaching at Bard College—which is a liberal arts school like NYU—for the last 17 years. I’d been interested in the Black Mountain College of Arts for a long time and I’d visited what is now a boys camp. I had a lot of ideas about what would be in the rooms. And we knew lots of people who went to school there. Then Tony Gasparro (the production designer) started inviting young artists and recent graduates of art school to come and make the art that would be the students’ art in the film. And so little by little, all the rooms started filling up and art started getting made. It was pretty cool. One of our production assistants knew how to use the looms and taught everybody how to use the looms because the loom woman had Covid! All the young actors had a long time to just hang out with nothing to do, so they all started learning—getting into the clay and getting into the dying, and they were learning everything. Then I’d like walk around and everybody would be teaching me how to do stuff. It became a totally active place before we started shooting. There were people making stuff in every room. It was so cool to see it go from nothing to being. It made you think like, oh, someone should put an art school here, a lot of people want to study art! One of my colleagues from Bard, Ben Coonley, made the sort of Buckminster Fuller-like dome. He came and did the projections and worked with the art department. It was great. That was like the hive. The whole thing was making an art school come to life.

What caused you to think of Michelle Williams for this project?
KR: One thing that helped me see Michelle in the part was in this collection of artists and sculptors. I had this image of Lee Bontecou when she was about Michelle’s age. She looks so much like Michelle, and that helped me see Michelle in the part. So aside from, you know, that I wanted to work with Michelle and I wanted to work with John Magaro, and I had to consider, how are these people related? Then came Maryann Plunkett and Judd Hirsch to make that family make sense. Michelle kind of waded in with Cynthia Lahti, whose art she’s making at first, virtually. Cynthia’s important and Michelle was in New York for a few months. And then I sent her like ten pounds of clay and some tools. And she waded into it and then she came to Portland and just started spending days in Cynthia’s studio. We then moved everything in Cynthia’s studio to that garage space. There are some houses and apartments that friends of mine built and sold to their artist friends there, and they’ve been passed down to various artists. I’ve stayed there too. I knew those spaces really well and that was for sort of planning how that would all go.

How has your relationship with Michelle changed over the course of making four films together?
KR: She goes off and works on a lot of things and I’ve made things in between the films I’ve done with her. But then you get together and I sort of reap the benefit from everything she’s been working on and learning in between. I mean, when I was watching Fosse/Verdon, I was just like, oh my God, Michelle can do so much more than I’m eking out! We were being a bit braver in a way than we were when we were younger because I think I had more trust in myself to start bigger and then pull stuff back as opposed to starting where you want to end up. Honestly, Michelle’s always been so trusting, which is an amazing thing. She’s just always been really trusting, which is the best thing you could ask for from your actors—that they trust you. Michelle always did, which was a big gift.

How did André Benjamin (André 3000) become involved?
KR: I was working with the casting director Gayle Keller and she sent me tons of images and somehow André ‘s picture got mixed in with the regular people pictures! And I had him on my wall with some of the sculptors, and over time, you know because you see pictures of him in his overalls, he just became Eric the kiln guy. I guess he took my number and he called and was like, hey, what’s going on? What you got going on? And I said, I want you to be this kiln guy. He was just up for it. He went out to Long Beach, to Cal State, and I had made a short film there, a 16mm film of the artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, who was out there working. They have huge kilns. I mean, they have enormous kilns and different kinds. Right after I was there filming, they got to know some of the people there and Jessica worked there. They said André could come—which wasn’t hard to talk them into. They would teach him how to work the kilns. I thought he’d go in and spend a day. After the first day he was like, oh my God, clay, I knew I needed to be doing this! He kept going back and making stuff. He would walk around whenever he wasn’t shooting, playing this wooden flute that he carries around with him and it was kind of always wafting in. On the last day at this school, I asked him if I could record him playing, and he went out in a field and he played for like 45 minutes. The crew sat around and listened to him and we recorded him and it was beautiful. I had that to work with in the editing room.

There’s this inherent power dynamic in the landlord/tenant situation between Lizzy and Jo, but there’s so much nuance and complexity to that relationship. Can you talk about that?
KR: I’m hesitant to in case in resonates differently for different people. When I was starting out in New York, we had an office on Lafayette Street. Killer Films was there, but it was called Apparatus at that time. And there were a lot of people in that building who could never afford to be in that building now. But I was in this building with all these filmmakers, and they all had trust funds and I didn’t. I could only be in that office because my friends let me have a desk there and work there. They all helped me get my first film made; they were so generous to me. Anything that happened that was good for any of us was good for all of us. I’m always saying this to my students: what you want to graduate with is people you want to make films with. We still go to each other for notes for our films. You need that. And a lot of those people blew through their trust funds helping people like me! But it’s never an even playing field regardless… race, sex, gender, money, connections. It’s like in the art world. Even in small ways, someone’s family is more draining than someone else’s family, you know, just in all the ways that one person’s life is more complicated. You know, when I think back, if someone had given me money to make a second film after my first film, I would not have known how to negotiate any of those things. All the things that come with making a film that are outside making a film, I had no idea how to negotiate that world. Some people totally know how to do it. I didn’t want to make a film about filmmaking, that’s for sure. But I do like the idea of how small politics are in everything. The original thinking when we came back from the Emily Carr trip came about when I was in L.A. with some friends and I went to these two different dinners where everyone was gossiping about the politics at the ceramic space. Like, who’s sleeping with the kiln guy? They’re getting the better space in the kiln and someone else’s stuff got burnt because they’re getting the short end of the stick. It was all about the kiln and space. I called John Raymond and was like, pottery has a lot of inside politics! This is so exciting, you know? Anyway, I think Lizzy and Jo really like each other’s work and that doesn’t mean you don’t have your moments of being like, we’re in a small town and there’s only so many people’s attention to get.  When you write a grant, there’s only so much money in the world, and who’s going to get it?

Q&A with A.V. Rockwell and Teyana Taylor

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

Can you describe the origins of this film, and why this story was one decided to tell?
A.V. Rockwell: I really wanted to tell a story, especially for my first film, that recognized my coming of age experience in New York City… and in that process, I could say farewell to the era that I grew up in. But I think what made it an urgent story was just really seeing how the city was starting to change dramatically in ways that it hadn’t before, in the sense that it felt like communities of color, black communities of New York, specifically, we were being targeted and being pushed out and erased from the city altogether. And experiencing that and witnessing that change firsthand was really hard to reconcile because, like, how do I feel about the fact that the city that I love so deeply doesn’t seem to love me and my people? And so I think this movie was an opportunity to do a deep dive into that. And I think in the ways that you see Terry and Inez, two people that are extremely vulnerable, you know, coming out of the foster care system, but yet here they are fighting for a home and gaining a sense of stability and building a family bond. And we see the power of having all of that, what it means to these two people. And so I think for them, they represent the generations of people that I’ve seen coming out of a community like Harlem that have fought for generations for that, and to have gentrification be yet one more obstacle that knocks us down again was just really, you know, really hard to see and to think about. And I thought about all the communities that aren’t served by the benefits of gentrification. So I think outside of that, I also just wanted to acknowledge my own story as a woman and a black woman coming up in this city, the inner city. I wanted this to be like my love letter to the inner city black women that nurtured me and uplifted me. And yet they’re made to feel so misunderstood and invisible within society, and not only within society, within our own communities, as you see showcased in the film. So I really wanted to show Inez as going on a journey, as a way to present the question of who is really fighting for us. Because you see, over the course of the movie, how she’s fighting for everyone else. She never fully feels loved and fully feels embraced. And I think that’s the story of so many black women, regardless of what their station is in life, just feeling like no matter what we give to the world, we’re made to feel that we are never quite enough. And, you know, is there anybody out there that will fully love us and not just see us as their superheroes? Or, you know, only see us when they need us.

I really wanted to know exactly what was happening in New York over this time period

Teyana, what drew you to the character of Inez?
Teyana Taylor: Everything A.V. said! Yeah. And it’s something that…that you feel the moment you read the script. Even with the synopsis, you know, it was… that was all I needed to see. Actually, the synopsis was all I really had— I hadn’t even had the script yet. And I immediately put myself on tape and knew that this was something that I wanted to be a part of because it was something I could relate to on so many different levels. You know, with getting into an industry where you kind of already feel unappreciated, or a little invisible, or unheard or, you know, different things like that… I can relate to Inez in a lot of those ways. I definitely wanted to be a part of this film and bring the story to life.

Could you discuss your research process for this film, specifically regarding the foster care system in New York City?
A.V. R: Yeah, I mean, that was definitely a part of it. I think I started at the foundation of the film just based on what my lived in experience of New York was. But I think obviously I had to do research into the areas that weren’t my experience, like the foster care system and making sure that I if I’m going to represent that in the film, especially in such a foundational way, that I did right by that story, that I was really representing it accurately, in addition to just making sure that I had all the information I needed to know how Inez would have done what she does in the film. But it went beyond that, I think, beyond my lived experience with the New York… I really wanted to know because this would have been stuff that I experienced as a child, like what was happening in the world, and how did we get here to where we’re at today? Obviously, the movie takes place over 20 years ago, so I did a wealth of research. I really wanted to know exactly what was happening in New York over this time period and how that would have impacted the life of these characters and of the people of New York City. But I also just wanted to know what this moment in time meant for New York in general, like for a city that is always changing. Was this just another shift or was this something different? And I think the research that I did into the history of New York confirmed that it was something I think there was just this shift at the turn of the century. And you see the landscape of New York changing and a lot, and the continuity of what makes New York, New York shifting dramatically. And it doesn’t feel like the same city to me. Just taking that deep dive and just learning what this means within the history of the city, because I think the movie is so much bigger than gentrification, even though that’s talked about, talked about a lot. I think it’s really about just what New York is altogether, where it’s at in its journey. And so I think all of that was important as well as also really unpacking how New York relates to the black community, because I didn’t feel loved… and also how we were being treated amongst other groups, other marginalized, marginalized groups that are also fighting for their place in the city. But I realized it never did. You know, it is it’s not that it didn’t love us. Now it’s like every period of progress in New York’s development has been at our expense, you know, from the beginning. But even when we were a community that was just below Wall Street, every time the city expanded, it was at our expense. And so to me, this is just like a climactic moment where we’re being potentially pushed off Manhattan Island altogether. And so I hope that this story, in all the ways that I was informed in the research to speak to what this time period is, I hope it creates an opportunity to talk about how New York relates to its citizens and the progress of the city, why the chase and pursuit of commerce always has to come before the needs of its communities and its citizens.

The chemistry between Inez and Terry, in all his ages, is so incredible. How did you create that bond?
TT: Inez was extremely heavy to play, but it was also extremely easy to pour myself into her, since I had already seen a lot of Inez within me, and it was really therapeutic for me to play her, for that reason. I was dealing with postpartum depression when I took on the role. So, you know, Inez was an outlet for me. So not only was I doing postpartum depression, but to go back home to my hometown and see so much history be erased, so much of the things that was accessible for my community be erased… My friends literally be erased. I was dealing with a lot of deaths, literally going to funerals during my lunch break. So, yeah, it was a lot. And I think timing is everything because I was able to really just throw my cape to the side and just have a moment of weakness for once, you know? Not have to be the strong woman, not have to be the super wife, not have to be this superstar to, you know, my supporters, not be a super mom… You know, I got to just like, cry out loud, deal with whatever quiet demons I was fighting. You know, though, I never let my demons defeat me. I defeated them. You know, I was able to allow Inez to be that outlet and to be that therapy session for me to cry out loud, because I knew that when A.V. yelled “cut,” that I had to go home, put my cape back on, and turn back into supermom and super wife and just super everything… and be a superhero. And you know, people don’t realize there’s a lot of the time a strong woman has to be strong and it’s never really by choice at all. You know we’re praised for being strong for others and showing up for others. But when we show up ourselves it’s an issue, you know, and I think that that’s why I relate to Inez so much. I think all women can relate to Inez because we’re always told to, you know, minimize our voice. You know, we’re not protected, we’re not appreciated enough, we’re not loved enough. So, you know, it was it was really, really easy to tap into Inez emotionally and mentally.