Archives

Q&A with Miranda July

Posted on by

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

Can you talk about your scriptwriting and research process?

Miranda July: Writing can come with all sorts of weird blocks, so part of it for me is outsmarting those blocks. In the beginning, I put notes in a file as they come to me in any part. It can be something from the real world, whether research-based or a memory. I don’t love to get lost in other movies or research; it doesn’t appeal to me that much. But I do have a deep reservoir of Mission Impossible the TV show. I would watch it every night with my dad and my brother and I loved it… the peeling off of the mask and the good guys and the villains, it’s so intense and kind of Shakespearian in that you don’t know who to trust. That was all in my pocket while writing this film. I had grown up with it and it felt intimately entwined with my family. That anxiety level of Mission Impossible kind of matched the anxiety level in my family. In terms of when I’m writing, once I’ve amassed enough notes, I work every day, like a regular job (though it’s much easier when your kids are able to attend school!). And then I’m like, what part do I want to write today? I know the story enough, but I don’t write in order. Then I try to connect these different islands of the story, and it seems to be less daunting that way.

If everyone is weird, then no one is weird

Old Dolio is such a great and unique character. How did you and Evan Rachel Wood work together to develop her voice and physicality?

Evan reassured me that Old Dolio was in there, soul-wise. I knew she was a great actress, but I did want to know that she connected to the character, which she did. We worked here, in my office. I got her some really baggy clothes. I felt like I couldn’t tell her to move in a certain way because that’s not where movement comes from; it really comes from your internal state. I used this process where I acted like a therapist and I interviewed her and asked her about her mom, all of these questions that I knew would make Old Dolio uncomfortable. At first she answered as Old Dolio, who didn’t want any part of this territory, and then I kept asking questions but told her she wasn’t allowed to talk, but that she could use noises and grunts.  And then we kept going. Then I told her no more sounds, just your body. Just knock things or do whatever you want. And she starting knocking books off shelves because her soul didn’t have a clear expression. I felt like that was the anchor to the physicality. And then we added language from the script, and Evan really kept this narrow communication output we had worked on and everything hung on that. And her low-register voice is real. She has a naturally low voice that she trained up to avoid vocal nodes when she sings. I don’t quite understand it but it was hers for the offering! I was like, can you do that for a whole movie? And it wasn’t even an issue. It so clearly helped her drop into the character.

The gas station sequence is such a significant moment in the film and really speaks to the rebirth of Old Dolio. How did you shoot that?

I had the pleasure of working on this movie with my great DP, Sebastian Winterø. We started a full year before we started shooting and he was in Copenhagen, he’s Danish. We did it like what we’re doing right now. We did 2-3 hour Skype sessions each week. We would assign ourselves different scenes and then we’d each bring different ideas to these sessions. He suggested that we do those pages—and it’s a lot of pages, from Old Dolio coming out of the bathroom to her crawling and Melanie—as a oner, without cutting. And to be honest, oners often seem a little macho to me, or they take me out of the movie. So I paused for a second, and I just imagined what it was going to be like and how wonderful it would be for Evan and Gina [Rodriguez] to just go, and not have to keep cutting and resetting. If the most essential thing is the performance there, I think that is worth anything, for them to get to live the moment continuously. But also, it had to feel different. You had to come out of that bathroom and feel the world had changed. And since the world hasn’t actually changed, the magic of film is that you get the change how the air feels. It’s a handheld camera and Sebastian is operating it and I think we (Me, Sebastian, Evan and Gina) are all people who work best when we’re on our edge. When it’s almost impossible, then we’re all like, okay, now I can really open it up. There were also multiple day players in that scene who never once messed up, they were really lovely too.  The rollercoaster that Evan especially goes through in that scene is something. Being reborn, then going to the mini mart, then realizing that she’s really hurt Gina and for the first time in her life, she doesn’t want to lose this person and doesn’t know what to do. It’s crazy how Evan pulls that off. I think she does it in a whole slow burn way over the whole movie, but that unit to me is so perfect. Then it’s sort of sets up how it’s one single movement from there to the end of the movie.

Gina Rodriguez is such a bright spot in the film, and seems to exist on a different plane than some of the other wonderfully odd supporting characters. When you’re writing, how do you calibrate these different levels of weirdness with your characters?

I feel that if everyone is weird, then no one is weird. It’s sort of airless. So you have to have a counterpoint. The hope with this was that this seemingly conventional character was actually more radical in regards to the emotional space she creates in the movie. The family can’t trust that an outsider might be inherently rigid, and not groundbreaking. I was playing with that and to be honest I just loved writing those lines and what Gina did with that part. She really is like this life force. She makes it look so easy that what’s she doing sometimes get missed, like the air or something. We just take it for granted. Gina is doing so much in this movie and she evolves and has so much depth, but she does it so lightly. I was blown away during shooting. I felt like she was this secret I was holding—that this person was such a phenomenal actress.

As far as different “densities” of characters you mention, I do it in all my work. It’s hard to speak to it articulately, but I’m glad you noticed!

The is the first feature you’ve directed that you haven’t also acted in. What advantages did that afford you?

I came to that simply because there was not a part for me, there’s no woman my age in this movie! That didn’t seem like a big deal to me; I’m often not in my books either. It was exciting. It just meant there was never going to be that point where I had an impossible job. The acting/directing job, I don’t know how it works sometimes. You’re like, I can either do another take or watch the last take, but I don’t have time to do both. That’s not functional! But you do it and it has its own magic. But this is all doable, that’s the difference. It’s like I have the space and time and the ability to see everything as opposed to half the movie happening over my shoulder when I’m in it. I’m a total control freak, hopefully on the side of joy, but it felt very nice. And also to be able to support my actors, in a way you can only do if you’re not one of them. I got to be “the mom” and not occasionally one of the other children. I may have been able to see my actors more clearly, to see what they needed and to give them more encouragement. I loved it. No regrets.

Q&A with Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart

Posted on by

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

It is obvious from the first frame that a tremendous amount of work went into this film, even by the high standards of feature animation. Can you discuss the seven year process?

Tomm Moore: The story development went hand in hand with the art development. Ross and I have known each other since we were eleven years old, and we had worked together before— he was the art director on The Secret of Kells. So we already had a visual language that we knew we wanted to explore further. Right from the beginning of the story development, there was a lot of art development too. A lot of stuff didn’t end up in the movie of course, but yeah, it’s definitely the most ambitious thing in terms of purely “pencil mileage” that our studio has ever done. We have sequences in there, like wolf vision, where every frame is a full background rendered on a page. But that wasn’t the focal point. I mean, we knew we wanted to do that, but we also knew we needed a story to justify that. And those ideas, those visual ideas, are all linked to story ideas. We didn’t just want it to be a neat collection of cool images. We wanted all the images to help tell the story and to bring an emotional aspect to the film. The themes were very important to us too. Friendship across borders, environmentalism, the warning about having a colonial mindset… We wanted to bury them deep enough to where they didn’t feel didactic, but we also wanted to make them integral to the story. So we had to keep reworking and reworking to make sure that the story focused on the two girls, Robyn and Mebh, and their points of view, because we kept getting lost in our own middle aged man fascination with the dad character, and the historical context and so forth. We went off on a lot of tangents!

hand drawn animation could and should be more expressive, more experimental

The visual language of the film is totally enthralling. There’s an energy and a sketchiness to the art that feels totally brave and unique.

TM: I’ve been moaning for years that photorealism is a bit of a dead end, and now that CG has achieved it, I think it’s free to go in all different directions! That’s why it’s so exciting to see things like I lost my Body, or Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse, and those kind of movies coming out. But for us, as hand drawn animators, it has been my manifesto for a long time that hand drawn animation could and should be more expressive, more experimental… be more like what happened to painting when photography came out (and we got expressionism and impressionism), and this is my thing that I was talking about back when Song of the Sea came out, and that same year, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya came out and kinda kicked me in the pants! Because it went even further than what I was talking about. I saw it and I thought, “wow, now those are drawings on screen,” and drawings that are expressive. So I felt that [Isao] Takahata had kind of thrown down the gauntlet to other hand drawn animators, sort of saying, “step it up! You can go farther.” And that was sort of the starting point for Ross and I. We looked at that, and particularly some sequences in that, and said to ourselves, “how can we get that energy onto the screen?” I’ve known Ross for a long time, and one of the things I’ve always loved about his work is that it has an energy and an organic vibrancy that isn’t going on with photorealism. We’ve had a little bit of that in our films from time to time, but let’s see how far we can go with that and really challenge the audience with Wolfwalkers.

Ross Stewart: Tomm and I have always been inspired by the visuals of short films. Short films frequently try to be visually much braver than feature films just because of the nature of making a huge production that involves hundreds of people. Trying to get everyone on the same style for a feature almost forces you to dumb down the art direction a little bit; you can’t afford to be as brave with the choices. And also there’s this fear that maybe over the course of ninety minutes, people might just get sick of a style that is really really far out there. So I think, in our younger days, we kind of maybe erred on the side of caution a little bit more. But for Wolfwalkers, I think especially after seeing The Tale of the Princess Kaguya and saying, “well, there’s a feature film that has rough sketchy lines and expressive lines the whole way through,” and it doesn’t bother or bug the audience, people don’t come out of the cinema saying, “yeah I wish the lines were a little bit tighter and a little more precise than that.” So it just shows how far you can go, and I actually think you can go much farther than we did in Wolfwalkers! Maybe the next one will be super expressive. I think we were always wary of concept art being really really energetic and really exciting, and then that also getting dumbed-down, so that what’s in the finished film is sometimes a little bit less than what’s in the concept art. And this time, we tried to make sure the energy and creativity of the concept art stayed through the entire finished film.

There’s something about animation that allows for a more intense connection to the story and emotion, in spite of the fact that on some level, it’s more abstract than living actors on a physical set.

TM: It’s George Clooney all the way through! You don’t remember the character’s name, you just say, “oh George Clooney fell in love with Scarlett Johansson.” Scott McCloud talks about it in his book “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art,” actually. He talks about Japanese animation and how it features very simple character design and very lush backgrounds, and by so doing it creates a kind of masking effect where you kind of get lost in the character. They’re like emojis or something: they’re very simple representations, and so they’re more universal in that way. It’s a very interesting theory, and even if it’s not 100% right, it’s very interesting to me anyway.

RS: I’ve often thought that. The veil doesn’t drop in the same way in animation. For example in The Simpsons, Homer is always that character. There’s no question of you thinking, “oh, that actor I know is playing that idiot.” Homer Simpson only exists as Homer Simpson. And I think that’s why everybody found him so funny. If it was an actor playing that, then I don’t think it would have worked.

TM: I’m a bit contrary sometimes. I love lowbrow art that’s actually kind of sophisticated. I love tatoo art, for example. Not everything is sailor Jerry, there’s some really interesting stuff, but generally people look down on tattoo art, and that kind of makes me like it more. And the same with comics and cartoons: I kind of love that we have this little niche where we can be really creative and we’re kind of away from the scrutiny of the “serious filmmakers,” you know what I mean? I don’t feel like we need to be “as good as,” I think we’re already way ahead and they just haven’t realized it yet.

Q&A with Kirsten Johnson

Posted on by

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Dick Johnson is Dead.

Sometimes as a documentarian, you don’t have total control. But in this film you were able to script things and envision scenarios.

Kirsten Johnson: Honestly I was trying to engage in not being in control. It was the dementia that had more control of the fate of my father and I in this movie. I’m really glad you brought up this idea of control because I think it’s central to these questions of how do we construct films, and how do we think about directors. Historically we’ve thought about directors as people who have a vision and find a way to execute that vision against all odds. What I would say that the team of people and I working on this film together discovered along with my father was that we found our way to a process in which we embraced our lack of control as humans. And it happened in several steps. Some of it we wished it to be and we made it happen; other times we realized we had to let go more than we even thought we did. I very purposefully acknowledge the recognition I got from Cameraperson. It was so unexpected and so remarkable for me that it really freed me to say, I want to take as much risk as I can in filmmaking, I want to be a part of pushing this form in new directions, and I’m liberated to take this huge leap into the void and have it be okay even it’s a total wipeout. I’m trying to keep my father alive by making this movie. So of course on some level it will fail. Once I figured out my dad had dementia, I decided I was going to keep him from falling apart by making this film. I was going to keep him at the center of things instead of sidelining him. All of those were wishes, and we did all the purposeful things in relation to cinematic language, in relation to thinking about the audience. Instead of doing things in the conventional order, we planned for the process out of order. I worked with the extraordinary sound mixer at Skywalker, Peter Horner, who did great work on Cameraperson. He so changed my ideas about the film in the last three days of mixing that film that I said I want sound mixing to happen in the beginning of this film, in the middle of this film, and at the end of this film. And I want the sound mixing to change the nature of the film. So we did that and it was amazing! We tried out these tonal things, like when my dad trips and falls on the ground. Is it funny? Is it road runner? Does it make you want to throw up? We tried all of these different ranges of sounds to find how sound affects our emotional experience. Learning from that, I would go out and shoot new things, both new documentary things and also try to imagine what we could do with VFX, or what we could do with set pieces in a studio and actors. This idea of back and forth was really part of the conception of the film. The set pieces of heaven we filmed almost at the very end of the movie, knowing that they would move throughout the film.

one image taught me to see another image.

So you were conceiving those particular set pieces as you went?

Totally. Here’s the principle. One, we all have blind spots. I’m obsessed with my blind spot, always trying to get in there and see it! And of course you can’t see it. Two, this idea that death itself is unexpected, by its very nature. Even if you have cancer, even if you have dementia, that doesn’t mean that you won’t walk out the door and trip and fall and hit your head and it’s over. We are having this conversation right now, and it could be either some of your last words or my last words on the planet. We don’t know that. Death is that crazy, but also that absurdist, that real, that funny. Except if you know and love the person dying, then you’re going to grieve if these are their last words. And I love you all, if these are my last words! When I was working on this film at the very beginning, I would say things like, well if I were to die… until finally someone called me out on it like “oh, IF you die?”. There’s a hubristic way in which we all are humans that recognize that other people are sick and aging, but think “I’m never gonna die,” and you live with that feeling. Even my dad at age 88 thinks he’s not dying. Obviously the pandemic shifts that for all of us. Suddenly we can all imagine death. We know who is the most vulnerable but also it is deeply random. There’s a desire to engage in the unexpected. The other thing I know that’s unexpected is documentary work. Literally every day if you’re out with a camera filming documentary footage, something happens that you cannot see coming. The world is that unpredictable. I was trying to harness what I know about the unexpected from documentary, and bump it up against the unknowability of the future. It’s unknowable what happens after death. So we built the unknowable back and forth into the film and started to blur those boundaries.

The film contains so many shots and sequences that really capture the core of this film. The voiceover in the rearview mirror in the tunnel, the after school drop-off where the VO doesn’t quite match, the shot where catch the guy with the bag on the street that you follow, and when you’re talking about sleepwalking and you have that shot of the window in the snow, which I think is masterful. Are you aware of these things when you shoot or do they come to your attention later?

I love the scenes you picked because they’re such intimate moments, moments of the face and the eyes. They’re tender and I would say small moments and yet they function in big ways because they do resonate with all the themes. One of things I do when I shoot documentaries is I have a going list in my brain of all the things I think the movie is interested in. With this movie, I’m interested in the idea of how do we make visible the invisible? I’m interested in the idea of cinema, the idea of deterioration. My father and Judy Karp (our wonderful sound person) and I were trapped in my dad’s office because of this sudden snowstorm. There’s never a snowstorm in Seattle where you can’t leave the building! But we were trapped in there and that’s one of the things I love most in documentaries. You get stuck somewhere after you think you’ve finished. We had already filmed everything I thought we needed to film, and then this crazy snowstorm happened and I was looking at the window and I thought, Whoa, dad looks like the Wizard of Oz. So suddenly there he is, boom, this head floating in space as snowflakes are going by. And it depends on what I focus on—the snowflakes or his face—which will determine whether he is together or whether he is fragmented. So it is kind of intentional but it’s also me responding to the shock that my ideas manifest themselves in the world. Then I start searching. I film it one way and another way and see if I should make the head bigger in the frame or smaller, and a lot of times I don’t realize until after filming that those images have taught me to see in new ways. And then I’ll film other things in response to my brain’s interaction with that image. I think that’s why at a certain point there’s a cumulation where everything starts to resonate and you wonder, how does this talk to that so strongly? And it’s because one image taught me to see another image.

How do you know when in the film to use the elevated Eames chair?

It was the last VFX thing we did. It was an idea that we found when shooting in dad’s office and he was sleeping in his chair. I had this idea that he was sort of floating away from me. And Nels [Bangerter] put it in and we thought wow that really works, but then it wasn’t the right place for it because it was the beginning of the movie. So we kept looking for the right place. And I honestly thought that this bedroom in my one-bedroom apartment in New York City was going to be his final room, but the pandemic changed that and he had to go to live my brother, and now lives in a dementia care facility. Two days ago I moved all of his stuff out of that room and I’m so grateful that I have the image of him floating away in that room. It is so my emotional experience of this. It’s like getting to have a hallucination of my own memories, my own future.

Q&A with Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortes

Posted on by

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of All In: The Fight for Democracy

Did you set out to make a film about Stacey Abrams? How did this story come together for you?

Liz Garbus: For us it started when Stacey reached out to us, to our company Story Syndicate (the company I run with Dan Cogan), about doing a story focused on voter suppression. She definitely did not want to do “the Stacey Abrams movie.” She thought strategically — I think rightly — that if you tell that story, it could be viewed as “just” a movie about Georgia, or about her. It’s an amazing story, but you risk making it look like it’s one unusual bug, instead of an intrinsic part of the system across the country. So what was really important for us was to figure out the balance. So it started with that call from Stacey, then I called Lisa, and we formed a team to work with Stacey on this project. And then the challenge was, what is the balance we need to find between having that central character that you feel you can relate to as an audience member — so it doesn’t feel like you’re watching some history lesson — and telling a more far national story? We thought it was important to have this really dynamic central character whose life story is emblematic of our nation’s struggle. And using her story as the spine was just such a helpful way for us to structure the film in terms of being able to circle back to that national history. Because of course past is prologue, and the intersections are constant.

civics is sexy, because it leads to engagement

What was your personal connection to the issue of voting rights before you started making this film?

LG: I think the 2016 election was really a wakeup call, not just about the electoral college for those who didn’t comprehend how it works, but beyond that the legacy of laws that have kept people from participating in our democracy. And I think certainly for a lot of white people, it’s not something that’s endemic in their lived experience. So, one of the things that made me very predisposed to to want to explore this topic was a case that I heard about when I was growing up, a case that my father tried prior to when I was born, when he was a lawyer at the ACLU. He represented a woman named Henrietta Wright in Mississippi. Henrietta Wright was a black woman who, twenty days after the Voting Rights Act was passed, went to the courthouse to register to vote. She was wearing a “Black Power” button, and as she drove home from the courthouse back to the diner where she and her husband lived and worked, she couldn’t even get out of the car and make it into the diner before a sheriff car pulled up— the sheriff tells her she’s under arrest. Why? He tells her she blew through a stop sign. She resists— she says she’s driven that way every day for years; there’s no stop sign on this route. And then they charge her additionally for resisting arrest, throw her into the police car, and proceed to jail her and beat her up all night. The next morning, they send her to a mental institution. This was clearly meant to send a message that in Mississippi, they were not going along with the Voting Rights Act ruling. It took a lot of federal enforcement to protect people at the polls, something we’re looking at again today. We have, obviously, a mass effort to recruit lawyers and other poll-watchers. So that was a case that certainly stuck with me. And is unfortunately still resonant today.

Lisa Cortes: It’s interesting because, as Liz mentioned, my personal history is similar in that both my parents and grandparents, in this country and in Latin America, have been involved in liberation movements. And so to have that inform me as a very young person, and to contribute to my sense of what the real issues are, marrying that with Liz I think was something really complimentary in terms of what we brought to the table via our lived experiences and our story-telling experiences. We were able to bring these things together to help us excavate this incredibly complex history.

 What did you learn while making this film?

LG: The story of voter suppression is disappointingly unsurprising. There is a pattern that has been repeated over and over through our history. Whenever there are these expansions — we talk about reconstruction in the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments — there is then this clamp-down with the black codes, the Mississippi Plan, the emergence of Jim Crow, violence… you know we saw this again after the Voting Rights Act was passed and the increase of the franchise it brought. And then in the 2000’s, chipping away, chipping away, chipping away until you get to Shelby v. Holder, in which, you know, those rights are once again impeded. What was extraordinary, I will say, was in seeing the Shelby v. Holder decision and then seeing how prepared those states — who had been under the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act — how they were just ready to go, within twenty four hours of the decision, to put new restrictive laws around voting on the books. It was like this power that was just hungry to exert itself against a changing nation. Against a nation which could well be very soon a majority-minority country. And I think it’s Stacey who says it in the film: Rather than adapt to the changing needs of your constituents, your strategy is just to eliminate them from your constituency. And that is what we’re facing, and that is why another movement — like the Civil Rights Movement — once we get on the other end of this current election, is really called for. And getting that voting rights act, which has been sitting on Mitch McConnell’s desk for 300 days, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, back out there on the floor is absolutely necessary.

What are you hoping to accomplish with this film?

LC: I think that civics is sexy, because it leads to engagement! It leads to helping us to make certain we have representation that is going to reflect the needs of our community. Whether it is the access to better education and clean water, or other very simple things that our communities are consistently hankering for, and to be able to feel like there is a voice out in the wilderness representing us. And so we would hope that there is an interest in the present history and the role that each of us can have as architects in the unfolding of our engagement… and that people can find a layer of involvement that works for them.

Q&A with Radha Blank

Posted on by

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Forty-Year-Old Version.

How did you balance wearing three hats as the writer, director, and lead actor at the same time?

It took a second to find my rhythm in that way. I did create a bubble around me because I needed to communicate with my DP Eric Branco, my AD Mike Walker… I wasn’t talking to a whole lot of people. My biggest job especially being in my own movie is making sure I hire people that know what they’re doing, from the cast to the crew, so I can do less talking. But part of my preparation is having rehearsals with the actors and handing the role over to them in some way, kind of seeing them as co-authors. I compare it to playing a tuba. Like, I want you to play a tuba but I don’t play a tuba, so I can’t tell you how to be a tuba player. I’m just trusting that you can come in and do this; I may conduct all these instruments at the same time so there’s some kind of synergy there, but I’m trusting that the actors are doing to do their jobs and to ensure that, we have a rehearsal beforehand so that when I’m on set I’m talking less and maybe only making a few adjustments. Somewhere around pre-production I told the screenwriter “thank you, you were great, you did your job, now go over there and have a seat. We’ve heard enough from you.” Every once in a while, “she” would perk up because maybe in rehearsal she’d hear an actor stumbling over some language or someone was talking too much, playing that tuba a little bit too long. But the two people that were present on the set were the director and the actor. One of the benefits of being at Sundance is having an incredible advisor like Clark Johnson. It was just amazing having his support along the journey. He gave me some great advice and would know since he’s acted and directed in some amazing things from The Wire to Homicide: Life on the Street. He said, “Radha, do me a favor and when you’re in a scene, be generous to your scene partner. Have your director take a minute over there because you don’t want to give them a line, and then when it’s time for them to give you a line, you’re looking at them like hmmm…” So it was really this choreographed dance between these different parts of my voices. I had to create this bubble of protection so that I wasn’t talking too much, I wasn’t draining my instrument too much, and I could still remain an overly generous director and actor.

I was being very deliberate about how we regard rap music and art in general

A lot of New York directors have acted in their work, and you’ve added to the canon in your own way. How did you work with New York as a character, particularly Harlem?

My process was not to show Harlem, but to let Harlem (as well as Brooklyn and the Bronx) just unfold. I’m a romantic in real life, but not as a filmmaker. At the end of the movie, when Radha and D are walking off into the Brooklyn night, you hear a bottle crash. You hear a two-by-four hitting something. You might see some empty potato chip bags wafting in the wind. My thing was to leave it be, don’t try to edit any of that out. In this way, whatever is organic to the city will rise to the top. There’s not a lot of Harlem landscape that you’re seeing. I think people think they’re seeing a lot of it, but really I only had half a day to get my B-roll in! And also, I wanted people to be the landscape. Listen, there’s no way anyone can ever recreate that opening scene in Manhattan. So me, instead of trying to do my version of it, I just let the film tell me what the vistas were, so that’s why you have a scene of bodies moving like this on 125th Street; you have an old lady checking her phone—sorry, a “marinated” woman checking her phone; kids playing. The people were the vistas. There weren’t these huge Ingmar Bergman wides of New York because it’s been done before. We can go to those films for a reference about how beautiful New York can look, but I was trying to show how beautiful New York people can look.

 As a writer, was it hard for you to not allow your character to have her moment to shine on stage at the rap evening? I was rooting for Radha and was frustrated with you as the writer!

She did shine. She did have a moment. It wasn’t on stage, and that’s the commentary. We relegate the stage to being the real place of performance when performance is happening in the basements, in a mirror, in a car passing by outside. Hip-hop is not a destination, it’s a meditation in the movie. This ain’t 8 Mile; it’s 2.2 miles. She’s not going that far. To me, I did that on purpose. That’s when we value the gift, when there’s an audience and people can cheer. But she has gotten off several times and that’s how Hip-hop is for me. I rhyme a lot, for myself, to get me through from point A to point B. So I’m glad you’re annoyed. You should be. What’s annoying is us always celebrating someone in the spotlight on the stage. I mean, what’s more artful than a homeless guy saying “My baby finally got her back blown.” That’s poetry. There’s no audience there in that moment, just the one person. That was why I did that. I was being very deliberate about how we regard rap music and art in general. It only seems like it’s a value when there’s audience, but for many of us it’s about getting through the grief of losing a parent, or a breakup, or not having success, or struggling financially. Radha ate in that cycle, you got two of New York’s baddest, and she’s like, I got something to say too.