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Q&A with Dominic Cooke

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

What was your approach to developing the look of the film? The 1960’s is an era we all know so well, but this felt different somehow.

Dominic Cook: In the early ’60’s in the UK, you might as well have been in the Edwardian era. Things simply had not changed! They changed politically in some ways after the second World War of course: they built the welfare state and the National Health Service; there were these big structural changes. But on the surface, life hadn’t changed at all. And the culture was still obsessed with sort of upper-middle-class, formal, domestic concerns. And that model, the sort of “empire” model of behavior, was absolutely the norm. And then within two or three years, The Beatles started, there was a huge amount of social legislation and upheaval, political protest… the world really started to shift. But in the early ’60’s, you could really have been at any time in the 20th century. So that was useful, because it told you where people’s values were, how they behaved, etc. I mean, we were just really hoping, with the aesthetic of the film, to avoid the obvious clichés. And the obvious cliché would be, “isn’t the West lovely, isn’t the Soviet Union horrible.” And we absolutely weren’t interested in doing that. I mean, I’m extremely critical of the Soviet System, but even as a huge critic of the Soviet system, there were many great things about it and what it delivered for the people. Equally, the Britain of that time was incredibly class orientated, it was very excluding… So, you know, we wanted to show, really, in the way we made the film, that what the film is really about two individuals who are completely outside of their own systems. Both systems were quite rigid, both systems both didn’t like people behaving in unorthodox ways. So therefore we made certain aesthetic choices… we used the same colors, the same sort of ideas in how we were shooting both the Soviet Union and the UK. The architecture speaks for itself, because obviously the buildings and the spaces look different. But that was the way we went. That conditioned our decisions. And the other thing was that I wanted it to feel more textured and rough than films depicting the time often do. It’s very hard not to make European movies look sort of appetizing and sentimental! Like, “wouldn’t it be good if we all lived in that time,” and I didn’t want that, I wanted it feel a bit edgier than that. So we restricted the pallet very harshly, we had very strict rules: there was to be absolutely no nature in the film (in fact we broke that rule twice: there’s a golf outing and there’s a camping holiday), but other than that, there are absolutely no trees at all. And I kept saying, “we’re not going to any locations with trees!” Because it’s really about these two guys caught in these systems. And we wanted to reflect that in the visuals. We made some rules, and we tried to stick by those rules.

The people were being trained not to feel, and if they did feel, not to show feeling

You have a background is in theater, but the film editing here is really incredible. It feels like there is no cutting at all. Can you discuss how you approached the edit?

DC: We actually had two totally brilliant editors working on this film. It was a long process— it took an entire year. It took a year because it was really about how much do you show, and how much do you not show. If you give the audience too much, you make them passive. And audiences are quick these days, and they’re smart. And so you often don’t need to give them that much, but if you don’t give enough they sort of disconnect. So it was a strange process of withholding information lots of the time, but also sort of really clarifying what the genre was. So for example, there is something inherently funny about the opening situation, where you have this rookie guy who’s just going to lunch with someone and then he’s asked to be involved in an international espionage mission! Which is actually what happened. And it’s quite funny. And I was very keen on the fact that is should be funny, because I think that humor and comedy allow an audience to connect with characters, it makes them listen. It reveals the humanity of the situation. But we had to get it right, because it was like, “this is almost too funny now,” and then the audience can’t come back to the seriousness of the film. What’s at stake when he gets off the plane in Moscow— he’s suddenly in a very dangerous situation. So those issues of balance were very important, and it was a really interesting process honing that. And then testing it with audiences… which is sort of a bizarre thing in and of itself. The danger of testing with an audience is that you ask them specific questions and they’ll give you specific answers. So yo have to receive that information very carefully. But there was a lot of useful information we got from that process, and I had two brilliant editors who worked so well on the fine-tuning of it.  

The scene between the protagonist and his wife, when she visits him in prison, is so quiet in spite of the tremendous underlying tension and emotion. Can you talk about your approach to there?

DC: I think Jessie Buckley is absolutely magnificent. If you’ve met her, you just can’t believe that she does what she does in this film, because she is the opposite of the character she plays. She’s so open, she’s so present… And available. And is quite young! And she totally understood both the extraordinary depth of feeling and the uptight upper-middle-class mentality that had to be shown simultaneously in that scene, and in general throughout her ordeal. Because she was quite a bit posher than her husband (who was from a working-class family). People in those days in Britain, they would change their actions, a lot, depending on their backgrounds and who they were speaking with. You were conditioned and bred and brought up not to show feeling. This comes from the empire. There is a really interesting interview with Rupert Everett in which he discussed his experience in the public school system. And he said that the public school system, the boarding school system, is designed to “cauterize emotion.” And that’s because the people that went there had to go off and run the empire. That’s why they were set up, those schools. And I thought that was quite revelatory. Because of course that passes down right through the whole of society. And it still exists now. The people were being trained not to feel, and if they did feel, not to show feeling. And that applied to women as well as men. So that’s a very long answer to your question, because the fact is that they were desperate in that scene: she thinks he’s going to die, and he wants to take away her pain, if you like. But they are trained to be unemotional. So those were the dynamics that were at play in that scene. And when we tested the film, interestingly, in the United States the demographics were really clear: women in the States didn’t get it, the first cut. They were like, “why the hell is she so cold?!” Women in Britain, on the other hand, didn’t say that! They sort of understood, you know, that this restraint she was showing was just social conditioning. So we actually went back and sort of “warmed it up” a bit in subsequent edits; we used takes where she showed slightly more vulnerability. It’s interesting, because it wasn’t the guys who split that way, in terms of US versus UK. So that’s an example of how the test-audience process turned out to be quite useful for us.

Q&A with Nikole Beckwith

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

Films like this are so clearly made with love and rely on character. What inspired you to tell this story in the form of a feature film?

Nikole Beckwith: In terms of what inspired the story, it was just curiosity. I was very curious about what would happen to two strangers if they were thrown into such an emotionally-charged and intimate circumstance, as well as something that was integral in moving them each forward into their own separate independent futures. I was a playwright before I worked in film and I have one play that had a child that was the product of an egg donation show up in the first act, and then another play that also had a surrogate through line. But my plays are absurdist and farcical, and I wanted to explore these issues in a very grounded real-world way. The absurdist stuff was in my head and I wanted to see what would happen if I moved these ideas down into my heart.

The absurdist stuff was in my head and I wanted to see what would happen if I moved these ideas down into my heart

Your first film was remarkably different in tone. How did you make such a dramatic shift for Together Together?

NB: It is a shift, for sure. I was approached after Stockholm, Pennsylvania was at Sundance by the San Francisco Film Society. They asked me to apply for this female genre fellowship they offer, and I think everyone was assuming that I’d apply for horror or thriller, but I applied for comedy! This film’s tone is a balancing act so I’m not sure I would describe it as pure comedy, but that’s what came out of it. So I submitted an application and a pitch for this story, which I had been kicking around for a while. And I got the fellowship and went to San Francisco and started thinking about it in a real way and put digital pen to digital paper. I think because this story is nine months—I wanted to tell it from the moment they met until the baby was born—that inherent closed loop made it obvious to me that this would be a feature.  

There’s a great quote in the press notes: “it’s a movie that is funny without jokes, sweet without sap, romantic without sex, and timeless even as it springs from so many contemporary ideals.” That really captured what I felt watching the film; I never felt manipulated into feeling certain things. Do you tune that during the writing process or does it happen on set?

NB: I think it just comes out. I write a lot of internal prose in my screenplays; I’m putting a thread of what’s happening internally with those characters, but it’s a light touch. I think that helps set the tone for the actors. It’s a lot of what I would say on set. I’m a very actor-centric writer, so I think when I’m writing a script, I’m writing it as a poem or a letter to the people that are going to pick up the mantle. It’s about communicating as much as I can about the tone and about the tenor in the prose of the script. But of course it gets fine-tuned on set, and then again in a major way in the editing room. We could have made the movie any number of tones once I was in the editing room, but I wanted to stay really true to the intention of the script.

Do you shoot with that editing and fine tuning in mind? Are you asking for different energies from your actors in order to keep open the possibilities?

NB: There is an exploratory element—what if it’s like this, or imagine that—but I think largely that’s in service of finding the space. And also to have fun and loosen up. It depends scene to scene or moment to moment; if I feel like the best thing to do is come in hot, and then the deeper we go into the take, release, or if I think it’s best to come in with subtlety and let each next take get bigger. But I do think that’s mostly in service of the actors’ experience and finding your way through the character and the internal rhythm of it all.

Can you talk about assembling this incredible cast?

NB: I’ll immediately give a shout out to Richard Hicks, my amazing casting director. I sent him the script well before we were officially working on it, and we’d check in periodically. He’d ask me “what about this vibe?” and he’s just an incredible casting director to collaborate with. He was also a performer so he’s very actor-centric, he’s incredible when he’s reading with people, and I think that’s part of the reason so much of the cast is so magical. I was selfishly creating a list of who do I want to go to work with in the morning, who do I admire most, who do I have a crush on their talent. One of my first questions about casting, is “are they nice?” which I know is not necessarily the way to prioritize casting, but I do really like a warm set, a non-yelling set, a we’re-all-it-in-together set. You’re not making bank in movies of this size. In fact, not only are making less money, but you’re working harder and the days are longer and the pages you’re shooting per day are more! So it is important that the people that are coming on board are there for the right reasons—they’ve connected to the script, they’re excited about who is on screen with them, and we’re all sharing in that vibe. So Tig [Notaro] knows Ed [Helms], and Ed is friends with Patti [Harrison], and those dynamics make it fun. I’m such a huge fan of Sufe Bradshaw; I didn’t even realize that would be possible. It was a very cool process. I remember when we sent it to Ed, I was like, cool, who are we going to send it to next? Because I thought there was no way Ed would sign on. And then when Ed wanted to meet, it was like winning the lottery, and it was the same way with Patti. And then we had Anna Konkle coming in as the birth coach. PEN15 is I think one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen and her physicality in that part is mind-blowing and so accurate. I felt so flattered when she stepped out of the PEN15 writers’ room for a day to play Shayleen and she did not disappoint. She’s very in her process and I loved watching her work. Every single day was like that! Fred Malemed, what an icon. Tig is so funny and present and her humanity and worldview is so rooted to everything she does. Even just having her positive and honest energy on set was such a big deal. Everyone’s contributions on set were to their roles, but also helping to create an environment where everyone is doing their best work and taking care of each other.

Q&A with Oliver Hermanus

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

What was your experience working with the author of the memoir on which the film is based?

Oliver Hermanus: The first thing I did, when I was certain I would tackle it, was I met with [author Andre Carl van der Merwe] a few times. And he was very aware, and very comfortable, with the idea that we didn’t want him to write the script for the film. And he was very happy with us to take it and run. And we really did run! The book and the film are vastly different. What I took out of the book was the context and the setting of the apartheid machine that was indoctrinating these boys, these teenagers. And I kind of pivoted the focus to that, and reduced the love story that was quite strong and prominent in the book. I shifted it into something very subtle and quiet. But he was happy for me to do that.

what made those men the way that they are?

What did you have to learn about the period in order to make this film?

OH: On one level of course, understanding the military is just a huge challenge. Making military films is like entering another universe, there’s so much you have to learn. And this is an extinct military, so everything about it is no longer current. So there was that level of it. But then in terms of the details, the texture of conscription, and the context of the war with Angola, was all very dense and I had to read and understand it. And it’s something that was not being reported on at the time. The kind of cold-war that was going on then— what we refer to colloquially as “The Border War,” the Namibian War of Independence, the government was intentionally not reporting on it. It was kind of happening quietly. At the time, the average South African wan’t fully aware of the details. All of the details kind of came out at the end of apartheid, when we had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and when there was this kind of investigation into what exactly was the nature of that conflict. So that’s why most South Africans were sort of… grey on the details. The only people who really knew about this war were the men who had to serve, and who had to fight, and pretty much all of them never speak about it. So I found that to be equally fascinating. And I went to Namibia, I went to visit all the camps, I became very forensic in just getting a sense of where this all took place and what that world looked like, because I had to recreate all of that in Cape Town!

The music is such a powerful force in the film. Can you discuss your approach?

OH: I think I somehow imagined this film as an opera, if that makes any sense? So the sort of brief to the composer was, “how do we do opera without voices?” In terms of creating a score that almost felt like a soundscape, it felt like a sort of representation of the time period and of the fear. Particularly for the first twenty minutes of the film it’s actually sort of one piece of music that starts at the very first frame of the film, and kind of dips out after the first scene and then comes back as the train sequence unfolds. And we sort of saw that as the tonal spirit of the music in the film. And then to constantly be contrasting that. I constantly wanted to contrast that using the Vivaldi, and the Schubert, and then Summer Breeze… just constantly adjusting the expected tone of the film as we went. Which was risky, to say the least.

How do you think this film fits into the current conversation happening around the world regarding rights for traditionally oppressed people?

OH: The film premiered in Venice, and on the day it was first shown, at the same time, it happened to be the biggest march against gender-based violence in South African history. There had been the George Floyd murder in America… we had a similarly horrifying experiences in South Africa. A young woman was murdered in a post office, and her murder just sort of shocked the whole country, and it was this senseless killing. And it mobilized women in South Africa within a week to organize a sort of national protest. So the life of Moffie as a film, in terms of an audience seeing it, started on this day of all days, and obviously the film deals with themes (toxic masculinity, whiteness) on the same day that a march was taking place in South Africa against these exact concepts. And as the pandemic has unfolded, and as we’ve seen what’s been happening in America with Black Lives Matter, and how we’ve all been kind of sitting at home, having to acknowledge and participate in some kind of seismic change… it has been an interesting journey for Moffie, because you know, I think my fascination in wanting to make the film was always in exploring this other part of my history, which is the fact that I’ve never considered the world from the perspective of a white person who oppressed my family historically, and why they would do that, what made those men the way that they are, the way that they were. And I think we are now in a space, politically and socially around the world, where we’re having to come to the intersection of these kinds of questions.

Q&A with Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennott

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

This is such a great story about collaboration right out of film school. Emma, what was your inspiration for the film?

Emma Seligman: I feel like a lot of film students heading into their senior year want to go out with a bang, like a huge dystopian sci-fi film or a period piece, and I was one of those kids. I presented my first draft of this sci-fi script to my professor in my first week—shout out to Yemane Demissie, he’s incredible—and he was like “What is going on? What is happening here in this story?” and I feel so grateful that he did that because I don’t know if other professors do. He inspired me to do something that I understood. So then immediately I thought, it has to be Jewish and it has to be at a family function because I feel like I know those characters better than I even know my friends. Then without thinking about it too consciously, I just sort of had a thought, sugar baby at a shiva. I set it up as a funny joke, like a bar joke, “girl runs into her sugar daddy at a shiva,” it felt like a good elevator pitch. As time went on and as I developed the short in class, and certainly as I developed the feature, I began to understand more layers of it… as a sexual coming of age story for this young woman as she realizes how limited her power is. Even that only really came together on the short, so it was a process of digging and digging and digging. On the short film we cut two scenes that were more about Max and their relationship. My DP for the short Leyna Rowan said, “I think this is just about her realizing things and going through a process,” and she was so right because we kept stressing on the short that this is an important scene because it’s when she finds out that he’s married, or she finds out that he has a baby. And we finally began to realize the reasons those scenes were so important.

she helped me craft an arc of panic

Rachel, how did you become involved in the project? You were also in the short.

We were looking at pictures of ourselves on the short the other night. It’s really been an amazing journey and I almost feel like it was fated. Both Emma and I went to NYU and I acted in a million thesis films, any student film I could book. Emma saw me in a few and reached out and I auditioned for the short. Emma is a brilliant writer and director and I noticed that instantly in the script. Her writing is so nuanced and she was able to write such a complicated woman character and showcase that in only seven minutes. What I love about Danielle is that she’s flawed and messy—I’m also a messy person—and such a raw character. After we wrapped the short, Emma said she wanted to make it into a feature and was talking about all her dreams and I felt we really connected. She was working on the feature and we began writing another script together and it became a natural process of collaboration and friendship. By the time we were shooting the feature, I really felt that I knew Danielle and had grown with her as a character, so it was a natural process.

What was the most challenging part of expanding the short into a feature, writing-wise?

ES: Tone. I kept wanting there to be more stuff happening so the audience would feel like they wanted to stay in that house for an hour and a half. But then it would slip into plastic territory where it would become more like Death at a Funeral vibes, which I love but it wasn’t right for this project. And then I’d try to pull it back, and it would feel like a drama. So I think finding that happy medium was tough. I added the upstairs bathroom scene a week before we shot, because I thought we needed something to make it pop and something extra messy about Danielle making a decision with her power. I also think the relationship with Maya was really hard to write because I felt it was so important, but some people warned me against trying to force the fact that she was bisexual into this. And Maya was her foil; she’s all the things that Danielle isn’t in this community. But then she’s also her light and sense of hope at the end of the tunnel. Writing that part was challenging because I wanted it to be clear that they had this complicated history where they love each other and hate each other but I didn’t want it to be overly expositional where they say “remember how we used to date in high school?”. Communicating their history without being expositional even came in the edit while we were doing test screenings for friends and professors. People picked up on it and asked about her relationship with Maya. So Hanna Park—our incredible editor—really helped me finesse just enough information to suggest they had stuff going on without explaining it.

Did you always anticipate a horror score and what sort of conversations did you and Rachel have about that tone?

ES: I actually didn’t think we were going to have a score because the short didn’t have a score and my main references were realistic movies or shows like Transparent or Opening Night… I guess some of them did have scores, but I didn’t really picture it. And then when we were shooting the scene where Danielle is looking over at the screaming baby and voices are sort of being drowned out, I didn’t realize how the scene was going to come together until shooting. That happens sometimes. I’m so grateful I was able to let myself be open to it changing, because I realized in that moment that all that dialogue was going to be background noise and Danielle’s focus in that scene is that she’s taking in that screaming baby and her sugar daddy’s life and I realized that music would be extremely helpful so we know what Danielle is feeling. There are so few moments where Danielle actually says what she honestly feels to other characters, so the music felt important to fill in those gaps, like we’re with her, we’re not with the other characters. We starting working with our composer Ariel [Marx] who had a string background, which I wanted. She sent me a violin sound library, and I kept saying I want it anxious, I want it anxious! And I checked all of these sounds in the library and she was like, “oh, you want a horror score” and I hadn’t thought about that way. And then I was like, oh yeah, this is kind of a horror movie. I think the main thing Rachel and I kept talking about was power, and where her power lies. I think tension comes from the filmmaking process. I never want to say to an actor “be tense!” and never want to explain the camerawork to them except on a technical level.

RS: Emma gave me some references before we shot and one that was very relevant to the tension thing was Black Swan. I think that in a similar way, the horror movie only exists to Danielle. One character is experiencing the horror movie and everyone else is there, having a grand old time. Danielle is in her own horror movie of what is it like to be a woman and have all of your identities collide, and Emma’s so great in that every day in the morning she’d come up to my dressing room and we’d talk about the day’s scenes. First, we’d chart power: who has the power in a given scene because it’s a constant back and forth, always flipping. Then we’d talk about what level of anxiety Danielle is at; she already goes into the shiva not wanting to be there and she walks in the door and the trouble starts. So Emma would help me track what level of panic Danielle was at in a given scene, whether she was at a seven or two. Like how when she’s outside with Maya and it’s a breath of fresh air but then we’re back inside and it’s revving up. Emma can really speak in a way that actors understand and it felt really collaborative in the way she helped me craft an arc of panic.  

Q&A with Stephen Basilone

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

How did your filmmaking process begin?

Stephen Basilone: When I started my career, I had a writing partner for a very long time and we started off writing features. The first thing we sold, we were 24 years old, it was very dumb and silly and low to the ground — like a Zucker Brothers spoof on a dance movie, sort of? So then we toiled away for a long time writing movies in our 20’s, and then I was fortunate enough to get into television. Which is, you know, much more sustainable, in terms of building momentum and building a career. But what comes along with that (unless you’re fortunate enough to have your own show, but it’s just so difficult to get anything made, and I was just lucky enough to work on things that were consistent), but you do that long enough, you do any job long enough, even if it’s your dream job… it becomes a job. You know, you get tired of servicing someone else’s vision, and you want a little bit more autonomy. And the dream of coming out here to Los Angeles… You know, if the worst thing that ever happened to me was to become a journeyman sitcom writer… that’s pretty good! That’s like a dream life to have. I’ve said this before, but I basically live in a house that dick jokes bought. And that’s crazy, that’s amazing, that’s a very cool thing… but that was not the goal. So I started to think about — after being on this one show for four years — what can I do, how can I put myself in a position to actually let somebody allow me to make a movie, without much directing experience? I had directed a behind-the-scenes documentary on a pop-punk band called “The All-American Rejects” when I was 25, but that was about it. And that’s a wildly different thing and that was made, basically, after-hours by drunk idiots… and it was fun, but it was a wildly different experience than making a feature. So, I wanted to write something that would put me in a position to succeed. Like, keep it low to the ground, make it so that it was about things I felt like I could cover (which is mostly character work), and make it so it was cheap enough that people would allow me the opportunity to do it. I wanted to do a movie that felt somewhat comforting, and like something you’ve seen before, but twisted a little bit. So it’s a movie that’s sort of in the Linklater realm of the “Before” trilogy, and also comforting along the lines of any sort of rom-com, but making it feel a little bit different.

As much as writing is wonderful and I very much enjoy it, it’s also terrible! And it sucks!

How did your experience as a director differ from being a writer?

I think one thing I’ve learned over the past year is that I’m inherently an extrovert. When I was younger, I foolishly thought being an extrovert meant that you’re very socially capable, and when you’re an introvert, you’re more resigned and shy. I didn’t realize until way too late in my life that as an extrovert, by definition, you get energy off of being with people as opposed to finding it exhausting. And I realized very much this year that I definitely get energy off of people. So that is… that was the thing that was great about directing. Because, you know, as much as writing is wonderful and I very much enjoy it, it’s also terrible! And it sucks! And it’s a very solitary experience. So it was nice to have more of a sense of camaraderie. That’s the thing that I’ve enjoyed most about working in television. Because as much as all these people grate on you, and get on your nerves (because you’re sitting with the same eight people in a room that smells like onions and farts all day)… you actually grow to love them! Because you spend all this time together, and you’re doing bits, and it’s fun. So that’s the thing that I enjoy about the television experience. And writing in general is very isolating and lonely, so being a director… it was nice to have all these people around. I really enjoy collaborating. And it was also just such a joy to take things, to take dumb little figments that came out of my brain, and get to see them come to life, and get to see how other people interpreted that. My wonderful Director of Photography on this project, who just made me look so much better and more talented than I am, Felipe [Vara de Rey], it was so great to see— he’d read the scene and he’d say, “I think we should cover it this way,” and I was like, “oh, that’s interesting, I was thinking this…” and just kind of getting into those ideas, and creating something that was better than the individual parts of our ideas. And it was just really fun! It was interesting getting to see two actors who are so incredibly facile and so game, and how they could take what was written on the page and just elevate that, immediately. I was not precious about the script— one of the nice things about being the writer and the director was that we didn’t really need to stick to anything. I knew what a scene needed to accomplish— this wasn’t Fincher or Sorkin! I didn’t have to stick to every “and, uhh, mmm,” it didn’t have to be jazz music with the dialog. It had to be real, it had to feel lived-in. So if words didn’t work the way I originally phrased in the script, then the actors had the freedom to make them their your own. It was very fun seeing how a dumb, goofy idea I had in my brain while getting a massage high one day came to fruition three years later in an actual performance.

How did you work with your Director of Photography to create the sensation of intimacy?

I tried to put myself in a position to succeed as much as possible. And one of the things I talked about with Felipe right off the bat was, I just wanted it to be all hand-held, I wanted it to feel very “lived in,” I wanted it to feel… very intentional, but not so composed that it felt cold. I wanted it to feel very warm. There are a lot blues and oranges. I wanted it to feel intimate, like you were right there as an audience member. For the story to work, you have to be in Bart’s headspace, intrinsically. You have to make this huge leap with him… you have to fall in love with her and the two of them, as they do, because if you don’t… the whole thing falls apart. It’s crazy. The emotional fulcrum you’re dealing with… it’s such a narrow thing that’s it’s all teetering on! So if you’re not with them the whole way, and if you as an audience member don’t feel like an intimate part of the story, I think it just falls apart. So that’s the thing we wanted to do, was create this space for the audience to be right with the characters, and not to have these showy elements that sort of… take you out of the film. While that stuff can be cool, and it can sometimes be very successful, it can also feel kind of masturbatory — “look what I can do!” — stuff that’s not servicing the story. So I didn’t want to stand in the way of the story. To have a very intimate, handheld feel made us feel like we were more a part of the journey with them. And I think that was a really integral part of the success of this film. You have to be there with them.