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Q&A with Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Save Yourselves!

What inspired you to tell a story in this specific genre, which is perhaps best described as a “sci-fi rom-com,” whatever that means!

Eleanor Wilson: That’s actually what the log-line for the film has always said! We started with the premise of, “wouldn’t it be funny if a couple went upstate to be off the grid for a week, and then aliens attacked?” And it always sort of leant itself to a genre mash up. But to be more specific, we wanted the comedy side of it to really feel like a classic rom-com.

Alex Huston: Exactly— for the characters to feel like real people, and not hokey or over the top.

EW: We always thought of it as being just this like normal rom-com movie that gets highjacked. There’s a point in the movie where they’re playing cards and they make out, and they think they’ve solved all their problems… and we sort of talked about that as the moment where the characters think that their movie ends! They’ve sorted through their problems and everything is fine… and then this additional layer gets introduced that throws everything into chaos. So, yeah, it was always the mash up of the two genres that was most exciting to us.

AH: We had some people who would read the early drafts of the script and say, “aww… I wish they could just have a nice weekend together up state; I wish there weren’t aliens in it.” And we thought that was really funny, because we were always focused on establishing it as a rom-com, because we love rom-coms, and then we wanted to inject this other genre. It was always a package deal from the start. That was what was appealing about the movie to us.

I don’t think if we had more money we would have done many things very differently.

What is a “Texas switch,” and more generally, how did you approach the practical visual effects in the film?

AH: You would recognize it as one of those scenes where a stunt performer does something like a triple flip, and they fall out of camera, and then the actor pops up in a close-up… that’s a Texas Switch. And you can also do it with quick camera moves. For instance, we had the alien fly out of the frame and then we whip-pan to the door, and there was another poof already on the door. So it’s just a little trick that allows you to switch out one actor for another. Or in this case, an alien.

EW: All of the practical effects are partly internal mechanisms and puppetry, and then so much of it is planning for the edit really carefully, because it’s just moments like that where you can’t get the entire move in one shot, so you have to get creative by doing these little techniques that somehow work out. And then when it’s cut together quickly, it sells I think.

AH: We did a lot of fun tricks, and that was part of the appeal. We were making this creature movie, which, even though it’s set this year or last year, we wanted it to feel like a classic movie. And we wanted to do all those tricks we’ve been watching our whole lives, and reading about, so we really dove into that. It made the effects in the movie feel like they were connected to the characters, and it made it feel like it was all one thing, as opposed to some CG alien that you can kinda tell it’s not really in the room. So that tactile aesthetic was pretty important to us. And it’s also so much fun! We got to do forced perspective shots, and projected backgrounds (no green screen), and then we added a layer of visual effects on top of everything else, because we didn’t want it to feel stale or hokey, I guess. We didn’t want it to be silly– we wanted it to be funny, but not stupid, if that makes sense.

EW: I don’t think if we had more money we would have done many things very differently. Because how we did it is just how we wanted to do it, regardless of budget. One of the huge benefits of capturing things in-camera, even though it does require a lot more preparation and a lot more front-loading of the work, it makes post-production so much easier. Which is definitely not how things are normally done on-set these days.

What did you learn about each other as directors?

AH: Eleanor has incredible character instincts and can see things way ahead of time, in terms of logistics, or the way the story is going to unfold. Like, if this happens now, we have to change that scene that’s coming up three scenes from now. It’s like a chess brain as opposed to my checkers brain. I was very appreciative of that. Now Eleanor… what’s something nice about me?

EW: Alex is very good at identifying what’s an important thing to stick to, and what’s a thing we can let go of. It’s a constant negotiation when you’re on-set making an indie film. I mean, we didn’t have to make any major concessions, but you know, in the moment there are tons of little things, like, “oh, this prop isn’t what we thought it was going to be,” and small things happen all day long that aren’t quite what you had in mind originally. And it’s just knowing the difference between the things that are important and that you have to fight for, and which are the things you just have to chill out about and let it happen… And Alex is very good at making that distinction, whereas I sort of get a little bit like, “everything is important!!”

AH: Having two people as the director is really helpful. Because your job as the director, mostly, is to communicate. To tell people yes or no or worry about it or don’t worry about it… and having another person to bounce that off of is huge. We also had a great script supervisor who made sure we didn’t forget jokes we had written into the script! You’re so busy with everything, and then the script supervisor chimes in and tells you you’re totally forgetting to shoot this funny reaction you had in the script… and then that reaction ends up in the trailer and totally sells the movie. You need all these people to make it work.

Q&A with Dawn Porter, Evan Hayes, Jayme Lemons, and Pete Souza

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Way I See It.

This film really seemed to hit at the perfect time. Can you talk about the genesis of the project?

Jayme Lemons: My partner Laura Dern and I were big fans of Pete’s in general, having seen his beautiful work throughout the Obama administration and not knowing that he also had been a photographer for President Reagan. We had become a little bit obsessed with his Instagram. Evan [Hayes] is one of our oldest friends and a producer we admired so much, and we ‘d been actively trying to find something to work on with Evan for years, so we got to talking about Pete’s work and what it reflects. Evan and I went to see some of Pete’s shows when he was on his book tour, and we convinced him to sit down for a meal with us, and started talking about the process. At the time, we weren’t sure exactly what it would be become, but then as it unfolded, we were able to see that a documentary would really be the way to do it. Evan and Laura and I never discussed anyone other than Dawn [Porter] to direct, and we were so happy when she came on board.

Pete, you’re accustomed to being behind the camera. How did they convince you to sit in front of it?

Pete Souza: They had a great track record. Evan had just done Free Solo, great documentary, and you can’t help but think of quality when you think of Laura Dern. So really, if I was going to choose to participate in a documentary, then this group here was the right group.

You could make this film forty times using different images

How did you even begin to narrow the focus out of all of Pete’s photos to the ones that appear in the film?

Evan Hayes: It was an incredible privilege. We had a few experiences where Pete comprehensively walked us through the archive. I remember sitting on my couch with Jayme and Dawn, and Pete saying “Where do you want to start?” and I said “Let’s start at the beginning.” Hours later, we needed to call it a night, but man, we were enthralled by every single image. For me, the images that stand out the most are not the ones that are most the iconic such as the Bin Laden raid or the “hair like mine” photo, but it’s the little moments of empathy and kindness. You know, Obama holding two newborn twins that one of his staffers had just had… photos that show this incredible empathy and compassion and human engagement with one another. I’ll let Dawn speak about culling them down, but those were the photos that excited me the most.

Dawn Porter: Pete took 1.9 million photos over eight years of the Obama presidency. Each of his shows he customizes to what themes he is going to discuss. We had the opportunity to see his show in public, but also the first time I met Pete, he did a version of his one-man show for us in a conference room, and it literally made me cry. I felt like exhaling, like it wasn’t all a dream. It’s not that Obama is perfect, or we want him back, but I think we want the feeling back of having a President who you feel is capable of taking the job of being President seriously. There are 650 images in the film, and a lot of that is due to the really hard work of our edit team— Ben Zweig, Jessica Congdon. Ben became the image expert. In my edit suite, he had all the books laid out and then we went through and tabbed the ones we were interested in, and then used those as a jumping off point. We went through them on whitehouse.gov, you can pick your favorites too! So that’s where we started. Then the second part was choosing themes that would come out in the movie, like empathy or kindness, leadership, or even the seriousness of the job. We had these buckets of photos and had our choices, and then after a couple of rounds of narrowing them down, we brought Pete into the process. He wasn’t seeing the film, but he knew which photos we were interested in, and he would say “oh there’s a better one here” or “you should really look at this one.” His encyclopedic knowledge of the photos could usually get us in the neighborhood of images to scroll through; it was a real embarrassment of riches. You could make this film forty times using different images, which speaks to the breadth and depth of the archive.

Pete, how difficult was it to stay neutral during the more emotional times, such as when President Obama was comforting the families after the Newtown tragedy?

PS: Well, those are the hardest times, certainly, when he was consoling and comforting people that had been affected by tragedy, whether it was a mass shooting like Newtown or a natural disaster like a tornado or hurricane. We had to do it many times, and there’s just a sensitivity about it. I don’t think it changes the way I photograph, but I am careful not to make anyone uncomfortable by my presence.

It was one of the most moving sequences in the film. As filmmakers, how did you approach the interviews?

DP: It became clear that one of the ways to elucidate what we’re seeing in the photos is to go back to some of the more iconic ones, like the one of Obama comforting the Wheelers after they lost their son. Pete got in contact with them and asked if they would be okay with their photo being used in the film, and would they talk about what the photo meant to them. I was really glad that Pete had that initial conversation with them privately, so that they could really express any reservations. Then I spoke to them with one of our APs, and David Wheeler said he would be honored to be in this movie about Pete, because Pete had been so careful with them before his book came out with that photo in it. He had not only called them, but he had gone to visit them and sat with them in the backyard and spent time with them. The photos are public; they belong to the American people. But they really appreciated the care and sensitivity Pete took with them before using that photo, and they extended that trust they had with him to us as filmmakers. It was the hardest interview I had ever done. I was asking him about the worst day of his life, which had happened several years ago, and knowing that I am going to bring him back to that moment is not something you do lightly. The photo of his wife sobbing into the arms of President Obama pretty much sums up the then, and the now. It was extremely hard and we are extremely grateful that David Wheeler did that interview. We tried to set it up in a place that was the most comforting for David, but in minutes the entire crew was crying. It was really tough.

PS: I’d like to point out that Obama did that with every family that night. It just so happens that the picture of the Wheelers was one that – I hate to use this word but – representative of that whole experience. But he did the same thing with every other family that night. He did that with twenty-six families. It’s hard to comprehend the pain and emotion involved.

Q&A with Bush + Renz

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

At what point in the filmmaking process did you realize you were going to structure the movie as you did, shifting perspective from Eden to Victoria?

Gerard Bush: Well, first, since the movie was based on a nightmare that I had, and since that really is what the nightmare showed me, it felt important to both of us that we respect that source material! But also, as we were making the movie, as we were writing the script that was to be the movie, we couldn’t help but think that it was crucial to indoctrinate the audience into this idea about the antebellum south. And to make them fully believe that they’re in the antebellum American south— in that time period. I don’t know that it would have been… I’m not saying it wouldn’t have been possible, or plausible, to achieve it otherwise; I do think that it would have been a more pedestrian approach that probably wouldn’t have been as interesting, because it would have been more about the trick of, “oh, wow! I totally believe this, and now I’m trying to figure out what is going on.” I think a big part of this movie, and a big part of the thrillers we tend to enjoy, is not so much the big horror moments, but is really the mystery. The intrigue in trying to figure out what’s going on, of trying to get to the bottom of it. So we felt the approach we took was the most effective way to achieve that goal. But from the very beginning, we felt like we needed to do it that way. 

The way you use language is fascinating. Some of it feels exactly authentic to the period, and some not at all.

GB: I think some people, upon the first viewing of the movie, assume that because we’re first-time feature directors… sometimes as first-timers, your choices are not necessarily trusted since you don’t have that body of work to reference. We’ve had people say, “oh, I thought that you didn’t do your homework,” or, “you weren’t thorough in prepping this,” but in fact it’s all very deliberate! And even the white supremacy language that’s used from the confederates, like “faith, family, folk,” is specific to the biggest white-supremacy group in the United States today.

Christopher Renz: Language was something that we played with a lot with the confederate soldiers, but also with the character of Julia. She has this modern feeling, this modern way of being, that does not match what you’d expect from that time period. In the first act, many people thought it was a complete mistake— that she wasn’t playing the character correctly at all. But in fact, all those things were layered in and contextualized quite intentionally.

GB: It was also important that we communicate to the audience the fact that the confederates were deeply insulted by hearing the evidence of the education of their prisoners. And so they demanded quiet, so that they were never taken out of the fantasy that they were living, of being superior to this group of people. But at the same time, they also recognized the strategy of those people and the fact that they were strategizing to get out, constantly. So for us, yes it was fun to play with the language that way and mess with the audience’s expectations a bit, but it was also a play on the question of, how much have things changed, really? How much of what was experienced in the antebellum south still happens? It’s not that it doesn’t exist any more— it just has a new way of expressing itself.

The idea of correcting the record of the romanticized antebellum south was important to us.

The naming of the characters is a major part of the film and carries real power with it. Can you explain why you felt that was so central to the story?

GB: I grew up — obviously Black — in Houston, Texas. And I was fascinated by how some of the black Texans that I knew would do whatever they could to try to tether themselves to their own humanity by choosing these really interesting first names. Because we all carried the brand of the original sin [of slavery] with our surnames. For instance, I’m pretty sure my family did not come to this country with the last name “Bush.” So, metaphorically within the movie and literally, it represents the brand that we carry. It’s actually a really evil and insidious, but brilliantly evil thing, that the slaveholders did by renaming and and having the slaves carry their names for all eternity. It’s just a constant brand and a reminder in the life that you’re living today as a free Black American that your ancestors were enslaved.

CR: And even the branding of Eden in one of the first scenes is symbolic of the name itself. 

GB: There’s been this false idea that the white women of the antebellum south didn’t have agency. And it was imperative that we correct that record. So much of the work that we were doing within the movie was in an effort to correct the record. If I look back at Gone with the Wind from 1939, obviously I have tremendous problems with that movie (a really beautiful, effective piece of propaganda), but if we’re going to correct the record we have to do a deeper dive than just relating the torment that he inflicts on Veronica Henley.

CR: The idea of correcting the record of the romanticized antebellum south was important to us. We even went and obtained the lenses used to shoot Gone with the Wind and refit them for our cameras so we could portray the story in a more honest light.

Q&A with Charlie Kaufman, Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of I’m Thinking of Ending Things.

The film adheres to the novel in some ways, and not in other ways. Charlie, when in your process do you make the decisions about where to stick to the text and where to depart?

Charlie Kaufman: When I’m starting to adapt a book, I read the book again in a different way than I first read it, when I’m just reading stuff. I start thinking about how it can be a movie and what I understand and don’t understand about the book. I had conversations with Iain Reid [who wrote the novel] and then I decided I needed to adjust some things for the movie version. I wanted to bring the young woman’s character into some sort of actual dynamic with the Jake character, so she would have some autonomy and some reaction to the things that were occurring.

When you send the script to your actors, you must know they are full of questions. Do you welcome those questions? And for the actors, how much do you want to know?

CK: I feel like I’m happy to answer any questions that I can about the script while talking to the actors. One of the things I did in the adaptation was make sure the scenes were playable, by people. That everything could be related to an actual human emotion or interaction. I think it’s very important when you’re working with actors that they have that, because it grounds it in something and makes it work on an honest human level, in addition to whatever symbolic level it might work on.

Jessie Buckley: I think that’s what was so incredible from the minute it became a reality, when we were shooting. The questions make you so much more involved. It’s such an active living when you get to set. Each moment is so active. Nothing in life is certain, so you’re constantly asking yourself questions about how you’re going to be in each moment, but also when the moment happens, that opens it up for you as well. Nothing was ever answered fully, it just became its own thing. And it could’ve been a million different things on different days. But the questions were so rich and useful, and they still are for me when I watch the film and talk to people about it now. That’s what’s beautiful; everyone has their own questions and it opens up your perspective about what you’ve understood of this world from your place because of how someone else understood it from their place.

Jesse Plemons: To a certain extent, in the beginning we did all the trying and getting close to one understanding. Close, on a basic general level. But it almost felt like just the asking of the questions was the most important part because when you do a scene that’s eleven pages long and sixteen minutes long, it kind of does what it wants to do in some ways. You can have an intellectual idea and then when you’re actually playing opposite someone like Jessie, or Toni [Collette] or David [Thewlis], the script is so rich and so open to so many different paths and thoughts and feelings. That’s where everything was discovered. We sort of picked at it intellectually ahead of time, but it was in playing with it that the real answers came.

It’s the exact gift and challenge you want as an actor

The design of the film is remarkably tight, from the camera movements to the framing. It feels like it’s designed to put us off balance. Can you talk about working with your DP [Lukasz Zal] to achieve that aesthetic?

CK: We talked about a lot, and we talked about the idea that this story exists in a somewhat alternate reality, sort of in a combination of memory and fantasy and thought. We chose the 4:3 aspect ratio because it felt right in terms of the closeness of it, and the claustrophobia of the story. In addition to that, we started working with the idea that when you’re imagining something, you know what the next step is in the story that you’re telling yourself. So we included this idea that the camera would anticipate what was going to happen next. There were a lot of camera movements that were designed to arrive at somebody before they start speaking. A clear example is at the beginning of the movie when Jake says “Have a seat in the living room,” and the camera anticipates that and actually moves away from them and positions itself where the young women is going to sit. There’s a lot of stuff Lukasz and I discussed… what the emotions of the story were, what different things needed to feel like. We were dealing with almost static situations – a big scene around a dinner table, all the scenes in the car – so we had some concerns about the limitations of those scenes and whether it would look boring. But I think what saved us, aside from those choices, is that the actors are so fun to watch. I never felt it was an issue in the editing room. Initially I didn’t know, but once I started working on it with Rob Frazen, the editor, we realized that there was no issue in terms of that aspect of things.

The set pieces in the car are remarkable and feel like theater. They’re long and thoughtful and full of allusions. How did you approach those?

CK: We did have some rehearsal beforehand. Jessie and Jesse were able to be there early and we did get to run through those scenes.

JB: I think we just kind of got into it! The takes were nearly twenty-five minutes long and we didn’t have that much time on each take. We probably had one or two takes before they’d try to wrap. We both got on and loved it very early, so there was a feeling of trust where we could just sit there and see what came out. Even from that first time we read it in the office, things were happening and that’s always a good sign. When you’re spending twelve hours a day in the car together, it is quite a bit like doing a play. You sink into something. It’s nice and there’s not much that can come in to distract; it feels intimate and protected.

JP: It felt like we were at the bottom of the ocean, or on another planet, and then Charlie would sometimes visit with an idea! Or sometimes he would sit in the back on a take, or jump in the car and chat in between takes. It was conducive to the feeling we were getting after. Once we got over the shock of it – which happened the first day – it just became so much fun. It’s the exact gift and challenge you want as an actor.

CK: I think that Jessie and Jesse were so good at keeping it alive. It’s always a concern when you rehearse things that there’s going to be a rote aspect to it, but it never felt like that. It always felt like they were in the moment that they were in and whatever was happening was being reacted to by the other person. Each take we took was always surprising and always exciting.   

Q&A with Richard Tanne

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

What did your writing process entail?

It kind of had the whiff of destiny, from the time I read the book. Because I connected with it so much. Then I went to meet with Lili — she was shooting her TV show in Vancouver, I had never met her before — and I had a whole vision I wanted to relay to her. I was showing her still frames from other films and talking about tone and music and my own experiences and she was very much on the same page and really got into that vision. From that day forward, I started writing the script. Now, mind you, we didn’t have the rights to the book at that point! We knew that the author was represented at the same agency as we were, and we both knew we had a passion for the project. I normally wouldn’t take that risk. But I felt so compulsively driven. I’d wake up every morning and just have to work on it. I had this other thing that I was on deadline for and I knew I should work on that, but I just couldn’t. I needed to work on this. So I just went with it. I told myself I’d give myself three or four weeks to exercise the demon that was the idea for this film. And that’s how long it took. It was a very intuitive process— I didn’t need to outline because I was using the bones of the book. That was new to me, and comforting, to have Krystal [Sutherland] there as this sort of unwitting collaborator. And then luckily we got the script to her and she loved it, and gave us the rights.

You shot the film in your hometown. Was that something that you wanted to do at the outset, or did the stars just align that way? What was that like for you?

Well, the book is set in an unnamed suburb of America. And it was great that Krystal wrote it that way; it allowed me to plug in my own hometown and location. And so I wrote it to the town… or at least, to an amalgamation of the surrounding towns and my town. From the time that I started pitching the project to studios and financiers that were interested in the script, I was talking about it as taking place in New Jersey. I just wanted to plant that in people’s minds, as well as the idea of shooting on film. I just figured those would be the two toughest things to have to persuade people on, so let me just start planting that idea immediately. The New Jersey thing was actually easier to get people onboard with. The film thing… we were triumphant, but it was a battle up to three days before filming. So all credit goes to Amazon for finally giving us the go-ahead. On one level I just saw it there. On another level, I thought it would be in keeping with this nostalgia project… or this time travel project, to be shooting as close to the locations and the areas that my friends and I walked around in, and partied in, and talked about life and love and death for the first time in our lives. It just felt like I could draw some sort of energy from that. And I think I did. At one point we were filming around the corner from where my mom currently lives — which is still in the town — and our base camp was basically at the end of her driveway! And she would drive to work in the morning, come by the set to say hi, and come back in the evening to check in… I mean, it was a real friends and family affair. It was lovely in that sense, too.

to me, it’s actually a story about failure

The end of the film doesn’t conform to a traditional romance, which is refreshing. Did you look at other films of the so-called “YA” genre for inspiration on what to do, or not do?

No. I actually have a little bit of a bone to pick with the label “YA.” Back when I was a teenager, in the early 2000’s and late ’90’s, you could have a movie like Rushmore, or Better Luck Tomorrow, or Ghost World, and they were allowed to be coming-of-age, or a crime parable, or a satire… but somewhere along the line, I guess with the proliferation of YA literature, anything that’s about young people these days — for the most part — gets stamped with the “YA” label. And, you know, I got to make this movie because theoretically on paper at least it’s a “YA” story. So, great, I got to slip a personal movie through the cracks because of what I think is sometimes a mischaracterization. The movies about young people that I’ve responded to recently, like The Hate you Give, or, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, or, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, they just seem like good movies that happen to be about young people. There’s a type of movie that’s about young people but told from the point of view of adults. For instance, Ladybird, or Boyhood. They’re fantastic films, and they’re looking back on adolescence, kind of with the wisdom of age. And then there are other movies about young people that are telling it from the perspective of the young people themselves. I guess there are tropes that I’m not as aware of in the “YA” genre. Krystal told me, in fact, that she deliberately tried to subvert some of those tropes when she wrote the book. One of those is the “manic pixie dream girl” trope. The whole point in writing the book — or I should say, one of them — for her was the excitement of being able to push back against that trope. Henry can’t fix her. Henry’s not capable of it, she has to fix herself. And Henry’s got to fix himself. And they both end up on this shared journey that gets bifurcated and they go off on their own ways, and have to have their own agency and do it themselves. Now, the book walks a fine line, because it’s told from the perspective of the boy, but that’s the way that Krystal wrote the story, and I think she wrote it that way to highlight just how different her female character was going to be from some of the others in the genre. But I can only speak to what I wanted do with the movie, which was to only try to let it be itself. To just be honest to what we were creating. In terms of it being an anti-romance, what I would say is that I don’t actually think Grace and Henry were in love with each other. I think that Grace needed Henry as a catalyst at that time — I’m not saying she didn’t like him, I think she definitely liked him — but she needed him to sort of distract her, or to show her that she wasn’t ready, or was ready — he’s a vehicle to her, in other words. And she needed that, and sometimes you need a friend who can be that for you. I think he, on the other hand, thought he was in love with Grace, but was really more in love with an idealized version of her. So to me, it’s actually a story about failure. It’s a story about picking up the pieces after you’ve failed, to get what you want or to make something work. And that, to me, made it unique from other stories I’d seen about teenagers.