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Q&A with Kogonada

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

You adapted this from a short story. How did that process begin?

Kogonada: I had a producer [Theresa Park] that was very committed to doing a project with me, and she sent me a collection of shorts. She had also bought the rights to a different short that I had read, and in that collection was this short. And there were some ingredients in this story… it was very slight and I knew it would have to be expanded. I have some friends that are chefs and they go to a market and they have an idea of what they want to make, but then they suddenly see some ingredients and then they know. I had some ideas of what my next film would be, and when I read this short there were just some essential ingredients that felt very personal to me. I wanted to explore and expand the story.

I love that idea about how you have to catch up to loss

How did that expansion work? How do you open up that short story? Did you talk to the author [Alexander Weinstein]?

Kogonada: I had the best experience a filmmaker can have with an author. I went to his house in Michigan and we had a great meal. He made me some loose-leaf tea, he’s quite the connoisseur. He had seen my first film, Columbus, and we shared a lot of the same sensibilities. He said “this film is yours, do whatever you want—I wrote the short that I wanted to write but I trust you with the film.” And he gave me the permission to make it my own. The short takes place in one day, there’s no memory bank and it’s really from the father’s perspective of having his own memories about Yang. It’s really a story about him catching up to grief that he didn’t know he had. For him, Yang was like an appliance, it was broken and it was almost annoying. But as he begins to recollect his memories of Yang and has an appreciation, he then feels the loss. I love that idea about how you have to catch up to loss. Sometimes it’s immediate and you know you’ve lost something, and other times, in order to feel loss, you have to feel love. That’s the bargain of loss—the pain only comes if you care deeply enough. In my life, I have felt detached at times and it protects you from feeling. As soon as I had kids, I felt so exposed and vulnerable in a way I never had. That relationship between keeping disconnected and detached versus the cost of caring was something thematically that I was exploring in my life as a new father.

I saw an interview with Colin Farrell where he was saying his impulse is usually to go big in scenes, and in this one he learned more restraint. The film is very internal.  

Kogonada: It was such a pleasure to work with Colin and he was so ready to play these notes and stay within an octave. We talked about jazz, about early Miles Davis versus late Miles Davis. He was ready and brought all of that into this film already. There were so many days when the notes he was playing were mesmerizing. As an actor, you can play a number of octaves, and it’s so clear just like a musician. If you want to get the applause, you can go everywhere and showcase those talents. But when you start trying to play two or three notes and hit a certain quality, if you do it well, it will hit someone and stay with them. And I think that’s what Colin did with this role. He was trying to figure out the notes of interior life without having to express it in more obvious ways.

The house they live in is so striking. How did you find it?

Kogonada: Even in the script, I had written that this was an interior story thematically. Initially, I had written that the only time we even feel the city or the outside world is through reflection or windows. And then at some point we decided to put in a few shots of the outside world. But I always knew this was going to be an interior story, obviously and explicitly the interior of Yang, and really Jake’s interior journey. So I knew that 70% of the film was going to be in this house. That house had to have a certain story in itself. For me, settings are not just settings or backgrounds but they are a part of the story. In the films I love, there’s such a sense of place within those films. I knew the house had to be able to carry the story. It was hard to articulate, but we were looking for a certain thing that has a spatial dynamic to match the family, but a lot of them were gigantic houses. I also wanted to keep them at a certain level—they’re not a wealthy family. Even though I think it looks fairly big, it’s actually a tiny Eichler house. So small and it required quite a bit to even figure out how to shoot scenes. But there was something in this Eichler layout that had a story. We built around the atrium. There was no tree but as soon as I saw the layout, I thought there should be a tree in the center of this house. It was one of three Eichler homes in New York, because Eichler did try to bring these houses to New York. They were low-cost mid-century homes and they never took off in New York, so there were only three. This house was abandoned and they’d been trying to sell it forever. When we walked in, everything was completely white. So we were able to take the shape of this house—which I loved—and the transparency and the way the house was built and just build our own version of this future home.

This film is begging me to ask about the opening credits. Tell us about conceiving that set piece. I heard it was Jodie Turner-Smith’s first day on set and you put her in a rubber suit!

Kogonada: I love dance and I love architecture, and I’m moved by both. When I was writing the script, Jodie has this line “I just want to be a family, a team.” At that moment, it just felt right. I suddenly felt that I wanted to see all these families in sync before we started unraveling them and individualizing them. We’re all a part of families, and either in sync or out of sync with them. There was just something to seeing the rhythm of families, and our main family in sync that put a real smile on my face when I wrote that in. I knew I wanted it to be a suspended credits sequence. When I was a little kid, I saw this this one martial arts film, this Shaw Brothers film that has suspended credits with each member of a gang showing off their specialty with different colored backdrops, and I think that film came to mind as I thought about how to stage this. But the choreographer had this lovely way of talking about it—she described it as “a pop of confetti” at the beginning of the film and the rest of the film is the confetti slowly falling to the ground. In regards to Jodie, who was such a gift to the film, we initially had an Iranian actress that was going to play the role of Kyra. This was during the Trump administration and they suddenly closed the border for her and she couldn’t get into the states. We were already in production and had to re-cast. We had a number of people and Jodie was one of the finalists but had missed her flight to New York, and arrived later that night. Colin read with her and sent me the clip, and we both realized she was incredible and had to play the role. She never went back to LA and two days later we had to film the dance scene! She had to learn the entire dance, and what was so incredible was that they had to really work on it together. By the end, they were all sweaty and high-fiving each other and they really felt like a family. It was such a great way to integrate her with the rest of the cast. All the families that danced certainly felt that way, bonded.  

Q&A with E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin

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

This story is incredibly dramatic on its face. What were the underlying themes that most resonated with you?

E. Chai Vasarhelyi: I think it’s important to remember how divided the world was in 2018. And here’s a story about people who came together — irregardless of national boarders, languages, politics — to save twelve children and a coach that no one has ever met before. And that idea of our common humanity uniting us (be it as parents, as children, or simply as people who are interested in doing the right thing) was really moving to both Jimmy and myself. It felt like one of those stories that was important, and was in some way even more important than even the rescue itself. Sharing the story, and reminding us all of what we have in common, was really important.

Jimmy Chin: I think we are always looking for the subtext, and stories that — as Chai just said — transcend the subjects and the event. But, that being said, there were also a lot of very tantalizing layers to it! You know, these unlikely heroes, the tension, and frankly it seemed like a huge challenge to make the film. And I think Chai and I like challenges! In terms of the ideas behind these last three films we’ve made, they are about human potential, in some bigger sense. About the potential to be your best selves… the potential to elevate who you are in these high-stakes moments. And in some ways we found a lot of similarities between the subject of our previous film and these divers who live these incredible lives and shape them entirely around cave diving. It’s a lifestyle, it’s not even a sport, really. They are devoted to the craft, and the craft requires perfection. And the stakes are extraordinarily high. So there was that part that really drew us in as well.

if we could all rise to the occasion to be our best selves, we’d be in a very different place

Can you talk about your filmmaking process?

ECV: I think we both agree that with nonfiction films, the magic is in the obstacles. Because unlike in narrative or fiction films, you can’t “write yourself out” of a problem. We hold ourselves to journalistic standards. So the constraints become opportunities to innovate or refine your craft. And this film had every constraint: if you were allowed to film in the cave, it’s pitch-black. If you filmed underwater, it was super muddy. No civilians were allowed to film within the cave. There was really no known footage of the cave itself; the British divers, as you can see in the movie, actively avoided the cameras of the press. There was a rights situation where the children and their families were not open to being filmed. And it was a pandemic. And it’s in Thailand, half way across the world. So long story short, there’s no footage. We had this very unusual position where we had an amazing story but no footage— unlike many documentaries that have tons of footage and no story! It just became a task about how to work around those limitations. And I think our reenactments just had to happen, which we realized early on. Because how do you allow people to understand what these British divers did under the circumstances?

JC: I mean, it was either animations, or recreations, you know? And I think that it was just about bringing audiences into the moment— the way that we put it together was that we wanted the divers (and we brought all the divers together) to really demonstrate how they did it. Down to the minute details. And so really it was a hugely informative experience with them, just to see them preparing to do what they do. Because even if you’re filming in a tank in a studio, it’s still diving. You still can’t make mistakes. And just to see the details: there’s a brief shot in the film of Jason swimming with five tanks. And it’s just a brief shot. But that’s the kind of task they have to do, and that’s accurate to what they did. How they swam, how they had to transport tanks… it’s already hugely complicated and difficult, and Jason’s down there swimming with all of this gear… All the details and the authenticity of what you’re seeing in the film is because they demonstrated for us exactly what happened.

How did you balance the various perspectives of the event?

JC: I think we really wanted to show what happened, you know? These details are all true to the events. One of the challenges I think about the story is that it is such a fractured perspective, in terms of… you know, the Thai Navy Seals were managing the rescue sight. The divers had their intentions. The water workers had their mission. And so everybody that was involved all had the best intentions, but you know… when you go on a complicated rescue sight (and I’ve been on some, on location), it can be extraordinarily chaotic. One of the main things that is focused on during those situations is making sure that the rescuers themselves don’t put themselves in danger. Because then you’re just adding victims. So that’s the reality of a situation like that. If you’re managing a rescue sight, and two random guys show up and are like, “excuse me, excuse me… we’re going to go in there…” you know, it gets kind of sketchy. We wanted to show the balance of what the challenges were, what it actually looked like, and present it so that people could feel and see all these different perspectives.

ECV: Just to add to that: we were very much drawn to being true to the essence of the story, and the essence of the story is that people from all walks of life — different languages, special forces, volunteers, Americans, Thais, Chinese, Australians — all came together, in spite of the challenges, to achieve the impossible. And if we all could do that, if we could all rise to the occasion to be our best selves, we’d be in a very different place. So that’s why it was our imperative, our moral imperative, just to compliment what they did, to try to include all those different points of view.

Q&A with Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar, Clifton Collins Jr. and Molly Parker

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

Can you talk about how you worked with the script once the film was cast?

Clint Bentley: It’s always such a pleasure when you bring an actor on to a role because they really fill it out. In this case, we really wrote this role for Clifton, the role of Jackson. We were developing the script with him for about a year before we started shooting. Of course, when you bring the actors on, they really give the characters life and bring them to life. But our process for writing this film was just to continue re-writing throughout the whole process. Molly and Clifton and Moises Arias (who plays Gabriel) did so much research and so much work to learn about the world of horse racing. They brought so much of their own lives and their own pasts to these characters and also things that they found in the world. Every night we’d sit down with them and go over the scenes for the next day and do re-writes and then turn in pages at midnight.

Greg Kwedar: We had worked with Clifton on our first film, and immediately were struck by the immense interiority of his work. He’s such a master of understanding the page and the words, but then he marries that into his process within the community that he shoots in. Then within that, as Clint said, so much of his own life—like his longstanding family history within entertainment and stories about fathers and grandfathers—were weaved into this material. And then the same thing happened with Molly. She came into this project and made what would’ve been a supporting character such a complex human who has all these different things to juggle as an employer, a friend, and as someone with something deeper simmering. All of these things that make the character of Ruth such a nuanced human being are due to Molly’s ability to have a storytelling mind along with what she was discussing throughout her own process.

I wanted it to feel somewhere between a documentary and a narrative

How did you workshop scenes the night before?

Molly Parker: It really helps when you’re all staying in the same hotel, five minutes from the track, and spending all your time together. It was such an extraordinary experience, and one that for me, as an actor, I hope and pray for. We made the film at a working track in Phoenix, we stayed really close to the track, and we were able to be there all day doing our research while these guys were off shooting something. Clifton would be working with jockeys, I was working with this terrific woman trainer who took me under her wing, and then at night we’d come together back at the hotel and talk about what we had coming the next day. It’s an incredibly fortunate experience to get to work in this way with real artists who are not caught in a rigid system of “we have to make films this way with this supporting architecture.” We were allowed so much latitude in how we got to work and these filmmakers are not only generous in their ability to seek out input and take it in, but truly view it as a collaborative effort. As actors, it gives you a sense of agency in what you’re doing and that’s really special.

Clifton, what is like learning that you’re getting a script written for you? Is it flattering?

Clifton Collins Jr.: It is flattering. As artists, you want to be of service to the character and the role, and to the director and the producers. That’s actually more fearful to me… not bringing the truth to the character and not meeting their expectations. You don’t want to let your friends down. Clint and Greg believed in me the first time, and now they believe in me again. It helps to have two people that you admire and respect and look up to believe in you in that fashion. On the outskirts of this, it’s being written for me and it’s on my shoulders and it could completely fail, but you can’t think of those things. You can only think of the through line and doing the best job and having the best story, being honest and organic and truthful and making sure that it’s their vision. As artists, we often go in as things start to develop and find things. Like, being on the track early on before shooting allows one to really soak up what’s happening today. They’re all resources and we find out how they fit in. Maybe some scenes aren’t meant to go deeper, and others are. To get to the depth of these emotions, one really has to go over it hundreds and hundreds of times. You don’t really have time to worry about what people are going to think and the pressure on your shoulders, because the pressure in this case was not letting my two boys down.  

GK: We feel the same pressure in a way, having built this friendship over the years between the two movies. I can’t stress enough how much Clifton creates this energy and space for bringing a community together. His hotel room became the place that we would do this work every night. He had changed all the light bulbs and redecorated the entire place and all the script pages and notes were around, and it was in the spirit of “let’s keep exploring, what else can we find,” and not to be precious but to be open. It was really a culture that started at the top of the call sheet that brought that playfulness and willingness to dive into the shadows and into the corners and under the rocks.

I understand it wasn’t a big call sheet!

CB: We had a crew of only about ten people and outside Clifton, Molly and Moises, we had one other actor, the talented Colleen Hartnett who plays Gabriel’s mother. Outside of that, everyone was from the track. The wonderful Leo, played by Logan Cormier, was a jockey and there were a lot of trainers in the movie, a lot of people that have never acted before. The general manager of the track plays a veterinarian! It was lovely. I didn’t quite know how we would pull it off but I wanted it to feel somewhere between a documentary and a narrative. You can only do that by stripping everything down to the necessities and then we could really fold our crew into that world of a live racetrack, as Molly was talking about. And then you’re open for poetry to come into the film and it makes your job much easier. In the same way that getting together with actors to work on the script isn’t necessarily because anything is wrong with the scene, but because it’ll be better with their input. You can just step into this world with a small crew and walk along the river and wild horses will come out magically and get in the frame!

MP: That in itself is special. Clifton and I have both been doing this a while and what Clint is talking about is what makes a good filmmaker. That ability to put ego aside and say “there’s nothing wrong with the scene but let’s make it better” doesn’t happen all the time. That is a talent that these filmmakers—as well as their producer Nancy Schafer—brought to it to create a space that allows us all to do that kind of work. I’ve known about Clifton for years since he came from the world of independent film, and I truly think he’s one of the great actors of my generation. It’s part of why I wanted to do this film. There was this role for him that I knew he would kill it. Clifton has this ability to be in it, be of it, and at the same time know that Clint is a first time director and think about how he can support him. It’s a real testament to his character and his talent. It’s pretty good work!

CCJ: You’re going to make me cry Molly. Again!

Q&A with Sian Heder, Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur, and Daniel Durant

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

What drew you to this material and inspired you to direct the film?

Sian Heder: I came to this because it was originally a studio film, and Lionsgate was looking to do a remake of La famille Bélier, a French film that came out in 2014. And coming in, I wanted to make sure that if I was taking on a movie that already existed that i could really make my own own movie. And, that there was enough in the story that I felt drawn to, that I felt deserved to become a whole other film. The CODA experience is a very unique experience. Particularly the idea of this character who was raised a hearing girl within deaf culture… and being sort of a bridge between the hearing world and the deaf world, and it seemed a way to explore both of those communities and that experience. And there was a lot in there that I felt was very deep, and could be explored in a character. Just the opportunity to explore deaf culture and see it on screen was really exciting to me!When I went back to look for films that I could watch to see how deaf culture had been treated in the past (to look for interesting three-dimensional deaf characters in the lead), there were so few. You know, I had to go back all the way back to Children of a Lesser God, which Marlee won an Oscar for, but it was thirty five years ago! So it was definitely something where I felt like there was this incredible lack of representation in film of deaf characters and of deaf culture. And that made me excited to dive in and surround myself with collaborators who could help me tell this story the right way, and who could help me present this culture in a way that honored American Sign Language (ASL), that honored this family and their particular dynamic, and that could put three amazing deaf actors in leading roles. So all of those things made me very excited about the project, and I did a lot of research when I was writing the script. I talked to many CODA’s, and listened to their stories, and their experiences growing up… I worked with deaf people to read the script and give me feedback on the story, and found the right collaborators, I think, to be able to be as authentic as I could be in representing this family.

Disability is only created when a culture does not make it possible to participate

What was it like to be able to collaborate in this way, for the actors?

Marlee Matlin: When I first read the script, I was really impressed. I knew that I was going to be in my element, but I had never played a part like this before, and I had never had an opportunity to work with more than one deaf actor in a part before. Three deaf actors carrying a film! And it was a story that would be talking about a deaf family— we’ve never seen that before. A family who is deaf, who has a hearing daughter. Which is called a CODA. It really just struck home for me. And so, knowing how powerful the script was, knowing that it really was representing what is out there, what happens in the deaf community… one of many, many stories of the deaf community that are out there… I knew that I had to go after this role, and I wanted to pursue it as much as I could. It wasn’t something that I wanted to let go. And I knew that the set would be extremely deaf-friendly. Not only did we have interpreters left and right, and everyone learned to sign— but also, the actors who were deaf were working in collaboration so wonderfully, so well together. And the bottom line was, it was just a great story with great actors, with a great crew, with great writing, and a great director to top it all off. And it was just a script and a story that was simply one-of-a-kind.

Troy Kotsur: When I first read that script, the first thing that struck me was, “oh yeah… I can show dirty sign language! Finally!” And I was totally enthused. I wanted to share our culture! And our language… our signing, our dirty jokes. I mean, I had seen so many movies that have cursing and graphic language… and I got pretty used to it. But this was our opportunity to depict our language, in that respect. And it was jarring for a lot of people, but I’m thinking, “really? Where have you been all this time?” So it was just an exciting opportunity to finally, through that script, to get a peak at our culture. Throughout our history, it’s usually been a single deaf role in a film, and that actor works with an all-hearing cast. And finally, we have more than one deaf actor— we have three authentic deaf characters who can really show our language in an authentic way. Like Marlee said, we felt at home. We could finally bring that to the big screen. And it was amazing to see our journey. And Sian as a director had a huge heart: she was sensitive, she was respective of our culture. Sometimes we felt like something wasn’t quite working in the script, and in other projects we may have been scared to ask about it or point it out. But Sian was receptive to our feedback, and really wanted to adapt it to fit our culture. It was an amazing process, and it was a rare opportunity. I feel very blessed.

Daniel Durant: Yeah, exactly. I had never seen a script like this before. I mean, obviously it was so strong in deaf culture. You know, other writers who may want to cover this material don’t have a deep understanding of deafness, but Sian did the research. She knew the culture, she got into it. And just as Troy said, with the dirty jokes, I was thrilled as well! Because you’ve never seen that on screen before. And we had this opportunity to do that here that was just so nice. Every actor here was amazing, the crew was fantastic, the director was great… I mean, it was just a magic opportunity and I feel so honored to be a part of this.

TK: If I could add: what’s more, with this story, it navigates between two worlds, two cultures. And the CODA has that experience, drawing from both communities and in some sense has that in common with the audience.

What does this film have to teach us about living, together, in a shared world, with mutual respect?

SH: I think it’s all about access. Because accessibility is the key to bridging this. Disability is only created when a culture does not make it possible to participate. Being in a wheelchair is not a disability except for the fact that we’ve built a society that has stairs everywhere! Not being able to hear, or being able to hear, is just a difference. And I have a disability when I go out with all these guys and my signing is only so-so, and everyone is chatting… and I’m trying to follow it, and I can’t quite keep up with the conversation, because in that moment, my lack of fluency in their language is making me the outsider. And I think the moment we put access in place — the fact that we are in this conversation right now, and we have someone signing on my behalf, and we can all chat just as we would on any panel — is tremendous. And I think that despite the fact that the Americans with Disabilities Act passed a long time ago… the fact is that access is still a problem, and there aren’t interpreters provided all the time, there aren’t open-captions in movie theaters on all movies, so that everybody can enjoy those films. So I think the problem is that society is somehow reluctant to open the door to bridge these barriers, to make it so that everyone can participate. In the process of making the film I’ve certainly had a very big education, and continued to, as I see these barriers come up… as I see that we don’t have access in certain situations, and I get upset, and Troy and Daniel and Marlee roll their eyes and say, “welcome to our world, we have to deal with this all the time.” But I think that, you know, a lot of the problem is that Hollywood and society has not been able to make the adjustment to say, “it’s actually easy to have an accessible set. All you need to do is put some interpreters in place, and you have a deaf-friendly set.”

MM: I’ve been in this business for thirty five years. And I was the first deaf actor to win an Academy Award… that’s the highest honor you can get in Hollywood, and I’m only one of four actors who got that award for their debut. And the youngest, to this day, for Best Actress. And I have been working fairly constantly, making appearances. And I’ve always attempted to… I don’t want to use the word “teach,” but to enlighten those who aren’t familiar with our community. Which is fine— not everyone knows about everything, after all. So from my perspective, I just learn to have patience and to collaborate. That’s important, that’s the key. We are definitely under-represented, and I believe that we can all agree that we are tired of it, we are overlooked. And that it’s time for people to get over being afraid of deafness and disability. Maybe it’s because they’ve never met deaf people, maybe some have. But they sort of push them aside. And there’s a great deal of “ableism” going on out there— we are tired of it, and yet at the same time, I will stand my ground, and continue to do what I love to do, which is to act. One critic even said, when I won my Oscar, that the voters chose me out of pity. And also that I was a deaf actor in a deaf role… how is that considered “great acting?” So I thought to myself, “ok, here’s clearly, obviously, ignorance.” I mean, if a hearing person plays a hearing role, is that not acting too? It’s a matter of continuing to have the conversation, to continuing to talk to people who want to work with us, to people who would like to work with us… and to be able to put our faces in front in a film like this, and not play roles that are necessarily token roles or background roles. This movie sets a standard and shows us how we can do to move forward to work together to deliver our craft as actors on the screen. And there are so many millions of stories out there to share— this is one example.

TK: You know, working with Sian, she really provided a great example of how to integrate a set. She really took her time to be a part of the deaf community. She visited the set of This Close and saw how they had all the logistics set up, so she was able get onto her own set and know exactly what to do. And then pre-production as well. It was important to have someone who was deaf involved, to make the necessary changes and give the necessary consultation, so that you can prepare— even before the first day of shooting. The same thing goes for post-production with the editing process, to make sure all of the signs are on screen appropriately. And another good example: hearing actors may sometimes misarticulate, and they are able to do voice-over in post for that. But if you make a mistake with signs, it’s there on the screen— you can’t fix it after the fact. So there’s the difference that a lot of people never really think of.

SH: That’s right— you can’t fix signs in editing, because there they are, on the screen. You can’t cut around it! I do think a lot of the time, you know (and these guys have all shared these experiences on-set), there is an expectation when a deaf actor is cast that they are going to show up and do all of the educating on top of their actual job (which is acting). Not only are they expected to perform the role that they are there to play, but they’re also expected to educate the crew, educate the director, educate the entire set on how they’re supposed to work… and I didn’t want that to be the dynamic on our set. I didn’t want to put that burden on these guys. I wanted to do my homework ahead of time, so that they could show up onto a set that was ready to go and we could all work together as collaborators. And having an ASL master on set is a really important part of that. Having that person behind the camera if the director is not deaf themselves, to be watching the sign language, to be making sure that if an actor flubs their lines in their signing, that they’re catching it. Making sure that the sign choices made by the actor will be really clear for a deaf audience. So I think all of those elements are very important, and need to be in place on a set so that the burden is not all on the actor.

MM: Exactly. I’d like to add, on this set, we were ready to go from day one. This was the first time I worked on a set where I didn’t have to worry about whether it was going to be accessible, or if there were going to be interpreters, or ASL masters… or anything. I was able to enter the set as an actor, ready to do my scene for that day. And that is exactly how it should be for actors who are deaf: the set should be ready for them to show up and start acting. You walk in, everything is in place, and we’re on the way to making a film.

Q&A with Potsy Ponciroli and Tim Blake Nelson

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

The locations are incredible. How did you find them?

Potsy Ponciroli: This film was really created out of the location. We were scouting for another project on a piece of property in Watertown Tennessee, which is about forty-five minutes outside of Nashville. And once you cross that forty-minute threshold, the landscape completely changes. It’s huge rolling hills and gorgeous tall orange-ish colored grass. So we’re scouting for this other project and this property is huge, 2500 acres, and we come over the hill and we see this old house. It’s over a hundred years old and it sits up on these stones and we walked down and around and through it, and then it started to get dark out. I live near Nashville and it’s more of city/suburb, and I’ll say the country gets really scary at night. The sun started going down, and I kept thinking, what would you do if someone came right now? You’re out there alone. That was the genesis of the story and it was built upon that location. The film was actually shot within 300 or 400 yards of that house, all on this property. We got to throw our base camp up and leave it and stay plugged in for twenty-one days.

you want to embrace the mythology at the same time as you’re trying to embrace the three-dimensional man

How did you come to cast Old Henry?

PP: This movie is what it is because of Tim. He read the script and we had a Zoom call that lasted about an hour and a half, and just really got to know each other. At the end of the call, he asked if I would be willing to go back into the script and look at this character and really build it with him. And I said, absolutely, that would be amazing. We talked probably every day for a month, pouring over stories of the old west and talking about different movies while really building out this world and this character. This was one of my favorite parts of the whole process—getting to know Tim and really collaborating with him on who Henry was, how he had lived and how he would sound. We went back to some books and found the way people spoke back then and took some words like “briggazine” and “knuckle and skulls.” These are words that we don’t use anymore but they fit in this world and it was a great experience digging down into this character with Tim.

Tim, what was that process like for you?

Tim Blake Nelson: In part because of COVID, I had almost a year from when I’d agreed to do the film to when we were shooting. So that involved a long process with Potsy developing the script. Potsy asked me come on as a producer fairly early and work with him in that capacity. I am not an actor who ever asks to be a producer, because too many actors leverage that desired title and don’t necessary earn it. So I agreed to become an executive producer on two conditions: one, if I really do the work, which is to develop this with Potsy, and two, that Potsy always had the last word. Because I believe that the best films are made by directors who have final cut in all respects. And I really wanted that for Potsy and it was gratifying when I met the actual producers on the movie and they wanted that too. This was a group of people that came together in support of one guy’s vision. I luxuriated in an entire year to really work things out with Potsy. We did research the character extensively and a lot of his vocabulary and mannerisms are historically accurate. Pretty much everything you see there is deliberate. For the first six months we did that, and then leading up to playing the role was more about physical preparation. There’s the historical antecedent of—I can say this since you’ve seen the movie—of playing a guy that’s an older Billy the Kid. Making him physically right and believable was important. He had these very distinctive teeth and a drooping eye, but he was also described to move in a particular way, smile in a particular way (which he seldom did), and his voice had a particular way about it. Finding that physical reality but letting it seep in slowly so in a way, the audience never sees it as a performance but as a real guy. And it was an enormous advantage to have the time to do that and also to have a leader in Potsy, who really believed in that process.

This is really a film about fathers and sons. Can you talk about working with Gavin Lewis?

PP: When you’re casting a teenager, you’re casting a really wide net because a lot of them haven’t had time to develop their careers yet and it’s hard to find the right person. We saw a lot of actors but there’s something about Gavin that really stood out… he has this old-fashioned vibe to him but he also feels a bit modern, and that fit in with this timeframe. It’s 1906, so the modern world is there, it’s outside of his door, but it’s outside of his reach because his dad is holding him back to protect him. I think Gavin really embodied that so well. He was eager to be there and listen and be a part of everything. In between takes he was always just the friendliest kid in the world and so happy to be around this thing we call a job. It’s pretty great when you find people that have a true love for filmmaking like that.

TBN: It helped that in both our on-screen relationship and off-screen he looked at me like a grizzled old ham. He had a lot of questions about when I was, you know, working with Mary Pickford (laughs) and what it was like working in the silent film era. We had a great natural relationship, he’s a terrific kid.

What sort of preparation did you do to play this historical character?

TBN: I read everything I could. There was one image available of him, and that image was incredibly helpful. It’s a full-frontal image and it’s Billy the Kid presenting himself as he wants to be seen, because he’s posing for a portrait when he is already notorious, or infamous. There’s a mythological feeling to it that’s almost purer than seeing a picture of the man that’s more candid, because of who and what he was and what he is in the iconography. Since this is a western, you want to embrace the mythology at the same time as you’re trying to embrace the three-dimensional man. It was a process of refracting everything I read through that photographic image. And being able to get right into the face and really see it and then try to get three-dimensional through that and imagine what the decades were in between. It was a challenge, but a really fun one. And luckily because of having played Buster Scruggs, I was already pretty good with a pistol because of the prep work I did for that film. Then it was a question of using that as a foundation but converting it into a character who really sees the pistol as a tool, the use of which needs to be restrained rather than a tool which is something about flourish and flash. It was a combination of reading and feeling my way through, and Potsy and his producers embraced the idea of having the time to do that. They let me come down three weeks early, which on a small production like this, it’s an enormous privilege.