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Q&A with Eskil Vogt

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

This is a very adult film about children and childhood. What were your inspirations for the story?

Eskil Vogt: I think I never would have made this movie if I hadn’t become a parent. Which may give you the wrong idea about my kids! But I never had that sort of nostalgic childhood that a lot of my friends had, that they’re constantly referencing. I was very happy to finally grow up and become an adult; I never looked back… until I had kids of my own. And then suddenly, I was reminded…looking at them…I had childhood memories that were triggered for me. And I just realized how differently you perceive the world as a child. How they live in kind of a parallel universe. And I just became curious about that secret world of childhood. And I think the first idea I had was about the “magic” of childhood. If a group of children were playing together, maybe something magical and inexplicable would happen, and then they’d go back to their homes and sit down for dinner with their mom and dad and that magic wasn’t there any more. And you would assume that it had been their imagination. But I thought maybe it would be interesting to make a film where that magic was for real. So I think that was the very first idea I had.

I thought maybe it would be interesting to make a film where that magic was for real

Did you know you were going to direct this film while you were writing it?

EV: Well, I’m a screenwriter, and usually I only write with my best friend Joachim Trier. And so it’s very comfortable, and it’s very easy for us to write together, because we start out sitting in a room together for a long time. And what comes up in that room is for him to direct, and when I sit alone writing, it’s for me to direct. So that’s usually quite easy to distinguish. But I think the first germ of this idea came when I was brainstorming with Joachim a few movies back (when we were writing a film called Thelma), and we knew we wanted to do something… I don’t know if you’ve seen his movies, but mostly it’s more human drama, and trying to make that cinematic. Trying to make scenes featuring two people talking more cinematic and interesting. And we thought, well, this time we’ll try to tap into some of the other kinds of movies we love: genre movies, that are inherently visual, where you are expected to create those kind of iconic visual moments. We love those movies! And we wanted to make one of those to see what happened. And I presented this story about the magic of childhood, and he wasn’t a father at the time, and maybe that was the reason he didn’t respond to that? And that’s normal— we kind of throw ideas at each other, and if the other one doesn’t pick up on it, it just lies there and we move on. This time it came back to me afterwards, however. And I started to work on it on my own.

The four main child actors give incredible performances. Can you discuss your casting process?  

EV: When I write, with Joachim or alone, I have this rule of not thinking of the practical concerns of shooting a film as I work. We don’t think about how hard it is to shoot at night when everyone’s tired, how that’s so slow… or how hard it is to shoot in a car (it’s so cramped, it takes so much time)… you have to leave all of that outside of the room in order to be creative. And I ended up writing a movie with four young kids and a cat! Which… you know what they say, “never work with kids or animals.” But we knew that that would be the main challenge of this production. So we used quite a lot of the budget to have time for casting. We spent about a year finding the kids and a little bit more time training with them, and getting them ready for the shoot. And I think also one of the keys to finding good child actors was to have an open mind about the characters. The casting director [Kjersti Paulsen] made me aware of how the underlying reason you see so much bad child acting in films and television is often because you start with the adults. You start with the most famous, most important adult actors you can find. And that’s usually the parent character. And then you have to find child actors who resemble the parents, or you need to find a child actor that resembles the adult actor, because they play the same character in different time layers. And you have a very limited selection to choose from. And so we said, “let’s just start by finding interesting kids.” Not even thinking about if they resembled the characters I’d written. And then when we find great kids, let’s see if we can fit the characters to them, and accommodate the actors. And then after that, we’ll find the adults. And I think that was a very important decision. I actually ended up changing the sex or ethnicity of all four child leads, because we found such great kids! In the original script, it was two brothers, for instance. But when we found the girl who plays the non-verbal autistic child [Alva Brynsmo Ramstad], that was written as a boy of 14, because I thought that just had to be an older actor, simply because that’s so hard to portray. But the casting director, she saw this girl waiting to audition for probably one of the other parts… and she was just zoning out and waiting. And she had this look… and something about that look captured the interest of the casting director. And we found that she actress had such easy access to that kind of zoned out acting. And she was so talented!

Q&A with Pierre Perifel, Luc Desmarchelier and Marc Maron

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

Marc, what was it like watching the finished product after doing the voice of Snake?

Marc Maron: I had no idea what the story was. When I saw the movie, it was like “oh, this is the movie?” I knew that I was with these other characters, and I have a hard time with scripts anyway, but when I saw the whole thing, there were twists and turns in the movie that I was a part of! I realized that’s what was going on. It was crazy.

Pierre Perifel: It’s funny Marc, in animation we usually don’t share the script. In live-action, when you arrive on a shoot, your script needs to be totally locked. You can’t really change anything unless you want to do pickups later. But with animation, it’s a work in progress all the time. You craft things, redo it, rewrite it, so we usually don’t share that script because we know it’s going to evolve so much.

MM: Right, it’s fluid. So it wasn’t like me just being weird and old? You never showed me a script is what you’re saying. Just little chunks of scenes and there was no way for me to actually put them together in my head. It wasn’t my fault. You did it.

PP: I did it. It’s really fluid, and at some point, the movie kind of takes its own life and you just go with it. It’s a very different process than what you would see in live action films.

with animation, it’s a work in progress all the time

Luc, how do you production design an animated film, especially considering it’s changing all the time?

Luc Desmarchelier: In animation, the production designer is in charge of all the visual components in the picture, everything. Creating the characters from the ground up, every set and every object within the sets, the textures, the colors, the composition, the lighting. All of that is in the general purview of the designers and of course, working in conjunction with all the other departments involved. It is a job that requires a lot of preparation and a solid concept to start with. A large part of the job is developing the visuals in pre-production. That’s where you try to solidify the ideas that underline the rules you want to set up for the world, and how it’s going to look. For instance, in color, we came up with this idea that was rooted in our references and influences. Like, we’re going to use only one color for the bad guys, and we’re going to use cool colors for the antagonist. That worked well because you can apply that to the police, who are going to be red and blue and black and white, and the villain was going to be cool colors in cool environments, while the bad guys were always the warm colors. This was the theory that we applied throughout the movie. It’s a simple rule that everyone on the team can understand and follow through in the spheres of their individual departments. If you come up with clear principles early on, you can apply them everywhere. After that it becomes like a marathon, ensuring these principles translate on the screen and making sure all the departments apply this visual consistency to the movie.

In a narrative film, a character might have some piece of wardrobe or a prop that helps them inform the character. How did you work together to develop the voice of Snake?  

MM: When we first got there, they showed me the sketches for the character but I think they were still trying to figure out how to get him to move. They definitely had a look for the guy and it definitely informed my voice of him, seeing that he was wearing this Hawaiian shirt and the sunglasses. They showed me several different sketches and even his face influenced how I approached the voice.

PP: It’s funny because if you take it from Marc’s point of view, he’s first exposed to one sketch. I can pitch him the overall world in which the story is going to happen… the animals, the heist film, the action sequences, and just a couple sketches of Snake because Marc came in so early. First we do an animatic with storyboards and try to translate the script into film form. Usually this is recorded with scratch voices, temp actors. Then we bring Marc in and he does his thing, but he just sees lines and a sketch of Snake. Then the next time he comes in, we’ve started rigging and modeling the character and now he can see it with volume, and then maybe the next time he comes in, he can see it with animation. Slowly, we’re pulling back the veil on the production as Marc begins to discover the film. Luc and I, as well as the production team, are well ahead of our actors because we can visualize it all. But from an outside perspective, it can be overwhelming when you’re thrown into that bath. A lot of my work with Marc was crappily doing line reads with him while trying to pitch him what the scene was about!

MM: That was actually really helpful. You didn’t read them crappy, it was just always you for all the characters. You had to set the scene. So you’d be like “let’s do another read of this because he’s coming in from here, and this just happened, they’re driving in a car so don’t yell, or, you need to yell here.” That was essential.

PP: Because at this point, you still don’t have animation. The fundamental difference between animation and live-action is that we do all the editing of the movie up front. We don’t edit footage that has been shot. We don’t have six or eight hours of dailies to chop down to a two-hour movie. We produce very precisely only the stuff that ends up on screen. You cut and write at the same time, so that is where the fluidity comes from. Throughout the production, you can do snippets and try things out. Part of the movie might be in production far down the line while other parts are still being worked on and chopped up.

The first shot of the film is incredible, and the longest shot in Dreamworks animation history, almost two and a half minutes. It’s does a beautiful job of setting the space for the audience and putting us in a Tarantino-like movie.  

PP: The movie used to start more like an Out of Sight werewolf would walk into the bank and super nicely rob the bank, like a gentleman thief. Then it would break out into the crazy car chase. We slowly realized the film was really a Snake/Wolf story. That’s also such a testament to how much things can change. Early on it was more of an ensemble story, and then we realized that the main two voices are Snake and Wolf. We needed to set them up early on. We discussed doing a flashback but I didn’t want to do a flashback, it felt cheesy forcing it into the movie. So we decided to start it with a casual conversation between two best friends. Then we decided to do a homage to Pulp Fiction in the diner and then you have the robbery and it sets up all these elements. Then we thought, what if we set it up as a one-shot? It’s so great visually and thematically. Later on, the Snake birthday idea came up because we really needed to bond those characters as a family, a dysfunctional family but one with a lot of love. I really wanted Tarantino-style dialogue where you just jump into the middle of a conversation between two guys that’s completely mundane. Marc and Sam [Rockwell] actually recorded this scene together.

MM: Once they realized a lot was hinging on the emotional connection between me and Sam, it was essential we had that connection. I think that was one of the scenes where we kept it loose and got to improv a bit. There’s a way that the two voices go together. My voice is, I think broader than Sam’s. He’s cool and I’m aggravated and I’m always operating at a pitch of crankiness. In that scene we had to figure out how these two voices moved together with humor and emotional connection and a bit of tension. It established a lot about the movie, those two characters, and where we’re going.

What were the key challenges for you, Luc? It must have been fun being able to pay homage to a classic scene while still making it your own.

LD: Yeah, it’s a classic. It’s a standard for any gangster film in LA, you’ve got to throw in a diner. The fun and the difficulty of it was to see how long we could make it last. If you want to do a really long take, in live-action or animation, you’re going to run into technical difficulties as well as staging issues. You have to plan the shot to make it seamless. In animation, the length of the shot within a single scene is a challenge for animators. There’s all kinds of problems. I think it was less a challenge for production design than it was for layout and animation. But the fun of it was figuring out when that cut was really going to land. You want to take the scene and draw it out and draw it out and cut at the point where it really makes a statement and vibrates.

Q&A with Ted Braun

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of ¡Viva Maestro!

What was your original artistic challenge when you were approached with this project? A profile of one person is quite different than your previous work.

Ted Braun: The previous films I’ve done, feature documentaries I’ve done (Betting on Zero, which looked at allegations of global economic criminality, and Darfur Now, which looked at allegations of massive, systemic violent crimes in Sudan) were, in different ways, ensemble stories about people trying to expose wrongdoing. And this film, from the outset, was an opportunity to focus on someone trying to expose beauty and art. From the start, it was focused on a single individual, Gustavo Dudamel. I was approached in March of 2016 — long ago, now! — just as Betting on Zero was about to premier at the Tribeca Film Festival. Like many films in Hollywood, this one began at a Jewish deli over breakfast in the San Fernando Valley. One of the producers of the film, Howard Bragman, asked, “what would you think about doing a film on Gustavo Dudamel for your next project?” Dudamel fascinated me. Before I met him (and certainly after I met him), he seemed like the sort of person who could carry a full feature film. He was a rich, dynamic personality; the camera was happy to be with him, and he was happy to have it around. And the opportunity to take a little bit of a break from the problems of the world (for me), and to focus on someone committed to bringing art and beauty into the world, seemed a very happy change of pace, and it posed an interesting set of creative challenges.

having to reiterate and re-articulate the story you’re trying to tell keeps you alive

Capturing live music is notoriously difficult. You have to be true to the moment, but also to the art of the musicians.

TB: That was one of the creative and technical challenges that excited me about this film at the outset. When I’m making vérité documentary films, present-tense films that are focused on people under very challenging circumstances trying to realize something of value to them… I like to work with a very small footprint and to be as unobtrusive as possible. Typically I’ll have a crew of three, or at most four, people: Cinematographer, sound recordist, a producer, and myself. And occasionally an assistant cameraperson. There was no way to film classical music effectively with a single camera. You couldn’t get the dynamic of the relationship between a conductor and an orchestra. And I was really intent on getting the audience into Gustavo’s shoes, so that the work of a conductor didn’t seem mysterious. It wasn’t just some person moving his hands with magic effect. You were there inside him, understanding that he was trying to bring a particular interpretation, that existed in his imagination, to life through a conversation between the orchestra and himself… and then ultimately sharing the results of that conversation (bringing it alive) for an audience. It’s a three-step creative process, and one involving multiple parts. There was no way we could capture those rehearsals and performances with a single camera. And so we had to bring a much larger crew. And in the end, for almost all the rehearsals, we were working with four cameras.

When does the shape or structure of the film start becoming apparent to you? Do you go into production with a clear idea, or do you let the events guide you?  

TB: Well, it’s a dance. Before I got into filmmaking, and had gone to graduate school for film, I had a chance to meet the great documentarian Fred Wiseman. I was living in Boston, and we were introduced by mutual friends. He was very dismissive of graduate school, and very dismissive of scripted films! He said, “why would you waste your time shooting something where the story is already decided? You’re just following the script… Documentary filmmaking is so great! It’s so athletic!” And I think he meant that… certainly in the years since then, I’ve taken it to mean not just the physical challenges of documentary filmmaking (which are significant, and I find very stimulating), but also the creative challenges. You have to respond to certain situations as a storyteller in much the way an athlete does: you have an idea, and then real life happens and you have to adjust. In this case, from the outset in order to secure the financing for the film, in order to put together a team… I had to have an idea of the story I was going to tell. And that serves as a kind of groundwork. And that carries through all the phases of shooting. When we head off to location, we’re going to be there for a week or ten days… you sit down and you talk with the crew, and it’s, “ok, what’s the story of this week? What do we imagine Gustavo is going to be doing? What’s he going to be up against? Where are those problems likely to come? How are we going to dramatize the conflict?” And then you have the same conversation each day, you know? As with a piece of jazz music, it’s sort of the tune you start with… and then, you know, crazy things happen! You have to abandon your plans and adjust. But it keeps you oriented. And so, constantly having to reiterate and re-articulate the story you’re trying to tell keeps you alive, keeps you focused… but it also allows you to adapt. And then… you get to the editing room!

Did you have a mentor when you were coming up in your career?

TB: That’s a very touching, and very good, question. My life… I have been fortunate to have been shaped by a lot of great teachers. In particular, I was shaped by a terrific music teacher when I was young. I grew up in a very small town in Vermont — there were more cows than people there — and in the fifth grade a woman named Jane Brown decided that she was going to start a music program at the local elementary school. And I was interested, and I picked an instrument, and she taught me for about a year. And I was serious… and she said, “we need to get you another teacher.” And that next teacher, a man named Neil Boyer, ended up transforming my life. Eventually I joined the Vermont youth orchestra, and for a long time I thought I was going to make a life in classical music. I thought I was going to be a bassoon player and play in orchestras. Ultimately, you know, though I came within a hair’s breadth of leaving Amherst College to go to Curtis [Institute of Music]… I chose not to, and ended up in film instead. But the relationship I had with Neil Boyer, who I saw once a week from sixth grade until I went off to college was really transformative. He opened my eyes to the benefits of discipline, of practice, to the joys of music… and made me feel that I could learn anything. And that kind of capacity as a young person: “My goodness… I could, if I practice well and hard, play any piece of music put in front of me?!” Suddenly you feel charged, and capable! In addition to feeling the joy and emotional satisfaction of playing music. So, yeah, I did have someone… you’ve touched a nerve as you can clearly tell. But that connection between me and Gustavo was, I think, one of the things that opened the door to making this film… and one of the things that gave him confidence that we were going to be seeing and operating on the same wavelength. And that come what may, whatever unexpected challenges unfolded (and as you saw in the film, there were some real, vast, and substantial unexpected challenges in this film), whatever those were, he and I were coming from a very common place of having our lives transformed by great teachers and having our lives transformed by music. 

Q&A with Richard Linklater and Tommy Pallotta

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood.

This film is such a joyous experience for the audience. How long has this idea been kicking around?

Richard Linklater: Like a lot of films that I’ve done, it had a really long gestation. I first had the idea around 2004. I thought 1969 was an interesting time to be a kid. I happened to live near NASA as we were walking on the moon. I wanted to show that whole Apollo program from the kid point of view, from the consumer point of view, sort of from the bottom up. We’ve seen a lot of films from the astronaut’s viewpoint. I wanted to get that in there but also to show how exciting it was to be alive during that time, especially as a kid. About ten years later I had a script, after thinking about it for years. Early on, I had the idea to recreate that time and also recreate this fantasy I had as probably a first-grader… “what if NASA needed me?” They say childhood ends when you stop having fantasies like that and start realizing how the world works! But at that age, you’re filled with stories and purpose and the idea that you can be helpful in the world. I don’t usually have that in my movies, but I thought it was a funny idea. Then I started doing the NASA research and started to see it from the adult perspective. Tommy and I have made two animated films, but it had been a while, so I started talking to him about this. Up until then, it wasn’t conceived as an animated film. It was live-action, but it wasn’t quite working in my head. Once I began talking to Tommy and thinking of it as animated, that’s when I knew how it would play for the viewer, in the mind where fantasy and memory and imagination reside. The literalness of live action wasn’t really helping the story. There’s something about animation that suspends your critical function a little bit and takes you into some completely constructed world. I think that’s the strength of animation—you just buy into the world that’s been created. Once we turned that corner and got going, it got really fun.

your visual memory is a big scrapbook

And Tommy, as a producer and head of animation, what were your initial impressions of the project?

Tommy Pallotta: I had been talking to Rick about it for a year, even before he had thought of it as an animation. I grew up in a suburb also in the shadow of NASA and in fact Rick and I temporarily lived in the same housing division, even though we didn’t know each other back then. He had been interviewing people and their memories of the time, things like that. And in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help thinking, oh man I want to work on this film but it wasn’t until he gave me a call in 2019 and sent over the script that he finally asked me what I thought. And I said, “why did it take you so long to ask me what I thought about it?!” I was really excited about it and the animation to me was really about the subjectivity of Stan’s mind and the idea that he’s older looking back onto it. When we did the animation, it allowed him to have the specificity and the creative flourishes of imagination and childhood.

It’s fascinating to think how this film feels like a descendant of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, even though it’s completely different. How did you both conceive of it as an evolution of your older work?

RL: I think we felt we had left it all on the field with A Scanner Darkly, which was an evolution in itself from Waking Life. Both of those films were perfect reflections of what we were trying to do at that time. But this really required a different palette to approach it as a period piece, and very specific. We had all this documentary footage and newsreel. We were creating a lot of actual history. I think a lot of that was holdover from the original conception of it as live action. We were having fun visual ideas as we talked about our palette, and saw it as this 1960s scrapbook look and feel, Kodachrome 40 with a lot of textures. It seemed like a great opportunity visually to tell this story.

TP: Every story has different characters and different themes and the animation should fit around that, instead of having a look and then trying to fit the story within that. Those past films were really rotoscoped films, 100%, and this has some rotoscope in it in terms of the performance capture, but everything else is traditional 2D animation. I think we drew on a lot of techniques that really reminded us of our childhood, like old Disney films but also Saturday morning cartoons, pop art from that period. We even animated it on twos, which means you do every other frame and that gives it that sort of Saturday morning feeling. It’s really about trying to get into that type of tone and mindset of that period and those characters.

There are so many different styles in the film. I couldn’t even keep track and it was a beautiful way to build the film around it with different storytelling beats.

RL: It was all in service to the story, like Tommy said. Think about how your memory works over time. You have your own lived memory from your life, but you also have memories from things you watched on TV, documentaries, cartoons. So your visual memory is a big scrapbook. We go through our lives with a lot of different textures and looks. Everything we did was to capture the essence of this story and capture the time and place and idea.

Tommy, how do you coordinate an army of people in the service of this film and keeping the vision consistent?

TP: It’s always one of the biggest challenges in making a film, even non-animated. You’re trying to get a shared vision among a large group of people. This was especially interesting and difficult to navigate because we had the pandemic. We shot some of our prints before the pandemic right before lockdown started. So some of the editing had to be remote. We started to build a team slowly and organically. Luckily, people who worked on this project are people that have worked on projects together for well over a decade. And I think that familiarity and the friendship and the shorthand when you have frequent collaborators really made it possible to make this movie with that cohesive vision all the way through. It started slowly, and Rick can really attest to this. It’s like watching paint dry. You’re doing design and backgrounds first, then you start working on the character animations and designs, and then you start to put it all together. It slowly builds and builds and as people become more familiar with it, pretty soon there’s just an avalanche of animation that comes through at the end as it all gets put together. In a way, you have about eighteen months to fine-tune that vision and go through the entire process.

Can you tell us if there are any autobiographical elements to the story?

RL: I’m one of the few filmmakers who will admit autobiography! Yeah, that was my high school, that was my college, yeah I met a girl once and we walked around all night. I never perfected the thing of “oh no, I just make all this up.” I don’t think autobiographical elements are all that big of an admission. That’s because by the time you’re actually doing it, it’s something else. You can try to make it 100% accurate, but more importantly you’re trying to make an entertaining story and something people can enjoy. You don’t stick to the facts. I’ll always push it to tell a better story so I’m not confined to any rules of autobiography. That said, the whole movie is almost embarrassingly autobiographical. But I was also making a kind of group autobiography of a time and a place. My dad didn’t work at NASA, but I had a lot of friends whose dads did. That helps tell our story better. Growing up, I was more on the cleaning up the table, taking out the trash and doing the dishes side of it. So I called up my sisters and asked “what was the food prep like?” and I’d remember once they rattled the items off… the Jell-o mold, the canned hams.  One of our producers, Mike Blizzard, he actually went to Ed White Elementary, which was the one closest to NASA. Tommy and I went to Westwood Elementary, which was a school farther away from NASA but still in the area. Of course we’re going to put in the one right next to NASA!

Q&A with Simon Rex

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

What were your first thoughts, after reading the script?

Simon Rex: I was just like… whoa. Whoa. WHOA! It was weird, because shooting it was… we shot it during the pandemic, obviously, we shot it only a year ago– so it was a quick turnaround. And it was one of those things, the whole time we were shooting it, I was anticipating we’d get shut down. So we were just kind of, like… the whole thing was just chaos. But in a good way, I think! And so, I didn’t even think we’d get through filming it. I had seen Sean [Baker’s] work; I trusted the guy, but the first time we met was for this movie. It all just happened so fast, and then when it was over, I’ve learned from experience that once you’re done shooting something, you just have to move on, as an actor. There are just so many films you do that come out mediocre at best, that you need to learn to just not get attached to any particular result. But when I saw this film, I was like, “this is what we shot?! Wow.” It was just impressive. Sean edited this; I was told early on that his strong point was editing, which was a little surprising to hear, since he was the writer and director, too! But his editing was really, really good. Having shot it, I can tell what he did to manipulate some of the stuff we did. Because we shot it on 16mm (ambitious, rare), and the whole thing was just crazy.

after this… I think I’m an Actor, with a capital ‘A.’ 

Does shooting on 16mm instead of digital change the experience at all for you, as an actor?

SR: There’s more pressure, obviously. If you’re shooting on digital, you can mess up all you want… but we were just on a very small budget, it was a ten person crew, and we basically… it was like a student film, or something? Which I liked! There were no trailers to relax in, there were no creature comforts at all. But I think that worked for this movie, because everyone was together in this environment. We had to – what’s the word? – when you ‘pod’ or ‘bubble’ together, in a quarantine? We all had to stay together. And so as a result of that, we bonded really quickly. We had a small group of people during a strange time, in a small town in Texas. And anytime you do any movie it’s like going to summer camp: you form these really deep bonds, and then it’s over and you go home. But this one was special, because we’ve all been spending more time together now that we’re actually doing press for it and so forth. It’s just a special thing, I’m really happy that Sean chose me, because he’s so talented.

I heard it was an unusual casting process. Was that your experience?  

SR: So I don’t know if this is widely known by now, but he cast everything himself. So he really is so hands-on. I love working with somebody who really knows the material. He wrote, directed, edited, cast… so he knows what he wants from conceptualizing the movie all the way through editing it, and that’s so rare. I’ve been on sets and the producers are chiming in over the director’s shoulder saying, “you should do this…” and there are all these creative differences. And Sean’s just like, “look, I’m going to make no money on this, but I’m going to do it my way.” And I really respect that. Because he has a vision and he’s going to execute it, and he holds firm. He’s clear that he won’t have other people telling him what to do. He’s choosing the font for the credits, he’s doing the sound, he’s doing everything. And I feel like when that happens, things come out better because there aren’t too many cooks in the kitchen. But to answer your question directly: we drove around this little town in southeast Texas, and Sean would drive around and cast on the streets! He’d be like, “oh, this guy has a good luck,” and just roll up on him. And Sean’s the nicest guy; he’s not intimidating in any way. Because it’s quite a thing to drive up to someone on the street during a pandemic and to say, “hey do you want to be in a movie”… people were taken aback. But he’s a very sweet, kind person, so people were actually pretty receptive. It was interesting to watch his casting process. Like in The Florida Project, [Brooklynn Prince], he found her the day before shooting started, in Orlando. The day before! I mean it’s crazy. The woman who plays my mother-in-law in this film, [Brenda Deiss], who I think is just incredible, she just lit up the screen. He walked out of an outhouse and she was right there asking for help jump-starting her car. And he’s like, “do you want to be in a movie?” And… she got cast and she was one of the best parts of the movie. So he has these happy accidents, I think because he’s so open.

You’ve said in the past that you consider yourself more of an entertainer than an actor. This performance in this film, however, is really outstanding. Has your view changed at all?

SR: I never felt comfortable calling myself an “actor,” I felt like I was being a fraud. Even though I acted in stuff… I just felt like a bit of… what do they call it? Imposter syndrome? I felt some of that, like I was just skating by, doing these comedy movies here and there and these sitcoms. It was easy. But this… for the first time, I actually feel like I can say, “ok, I’m an actor.” I’m so proud of this movie and happy with it, that yes, now, finally, after twenty five years in the business… I’m comfortable saying I’m an actor. Because I remember doing something with Action Bronson on Vice, and it was his cooking show called, “F*uck That’s Delicious.” And when they put me on the screen they titled me, “Entertainer Simon Rex.” And I liked that. And that seemed fair. But now after this… I think I’m an Actor, with a capital ‘A.’