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Q&A with Sean Mullin

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of It Ain’t Over.

When did you first start noticing a disconnect between Yogi Berra’s reputation and the player the stats showed him to be?
Sean Mullin: I think that’s what this was all about. When I started doing the research, I was like, wait, this guy was criminally overlooked. I mean, he was an incredible ballplayer and he’s not really talked about in a lot of the same circles as the greats. People always thought that he was good but not great. I think that there’s a difference between good and great. We really wanted to hit that home. The project came about because of Peter Sobiloff, our initial producer on this. He’s a big Yankee fan, and his wife dragged him to the theater to see the Mr. Rogers documentary [Won’t You Be My Neighbor?] in 2018. It was a Sunday, he was kicking and screaming, and as often happened in Peter’s life, his wife proved him wrong. He loved the movie. He absolutely loved it. And the next day, Monday, that’s when this project started. He went to the Yogi Berra charity golf event and he met the Berra sons. And he asked, why hasn’t there been a Mr. Rogers-like documentary about your dad? And they said, we don’t know. And then Peter told them, I have the perfect director for you. Peter had been a financier on Amira & Sam, my first film. He called me and said, would you want to direct a doc about Yogi? And initially I said, no, he’s too perfect. Where’s the drama? How am I going to get 90 minutes sustained on this story? And then I said, give me a beat. And then the deeper I dug, the more apparent this disconnect between perception and reality became. And finally, I was like, yes, yes, yes. This is the hook. Then I got the sons and we started shooting. The very first thing we shot was Dale’s book signing. He spoke about the drug abuse on the first day of shooting and that went really well and ended up in the film. I met Lindsay there too. I interviewed Lindsay a couple times like and every time she was like, you know, in 2015 I was watching that game with the “Greatest Players” with my grandfather and I said to him, maybe you should have been considered for that. She told me this story a couple of times so I said, how about we open the movie with this? We’ll use that as the hook. We’re not trying to say anything negative about Willie Mays or Hank Aaron or Sandy Koufax of Johnny Bench—they’re all icons and incredible players. But Yogi probably should have been in that conversation too.

I wanted to make a movie about a life well-lived

I read that you didn’t want to do a hagiography. Was that challenging given that the family was so closely involved?
They were involved in that they gave interviews, but we had full creative control and final cuts. I finally showed it to Lindsay and Larry when we were in the final cut stage, when we were almost ready to lock picture. We wanted to talk to them before we locked in case there was something really glaring. And they had two small notes, one of them was factual, a photo we had labeled wrong. We thought it was Yogi’s mom, but it was his aunt. The other thing—the problem with making a movie like this is that you can’t get everybody in there, right? Phil Rizzuto was one of the best friends. He’s hardly even in the film. It’s hard, you know, that was a difficult decision to make. But there were two people that Lindsay was adamant that we include. Gil Hodges was one of them. There was a quick Gil Hodges bit where he passed away and there was a funeral shot.  And then there was one about Elston Howard too. We added a quick beat about him in the late editing stages. But yeah, other than that, if you don’t like the film, it’s my fault!

This is a guy where you can take any part of his life and make a full-length documentary about it. How did structure the film to fit everything in?
That’s a great question. I mean, I’m a writer at heart. I broke in as a screenwriter. I’m a proud member of the Writers Guild of America, which is obviously right now on strike. I make sure all of my documentaries are covered under WGA contracts. So this is a WGA documentary. But I’m not writing the interviews. The people are saying what they want. But I am writing the structure, I am saying, this is Yogi’s life. There are three acts, just as I would do in a fictional screenplay. And within those three acts, the way I write, I do eight sequences. This film is two sequences in the first act, three to four sequences in the second, and two in the third act. Each sequence is 10-15 minutes and each sequence is a short film, essentially. That’s how I write my fiction screenplays and that’s how I structure my documentaries. I look at this three-act structure and I label them. The first one is “Becoming Yogi” and the second one is “Doesn’t look like a Yankee.” I label each short film. For this film in particular, they’re even more pronounced because I demarcated them with those title cards, the ones with quotes from someone “super smart” along with the quotes from Yogi. And eight ended up being a nice number for the sequences, because that’s Yogi’s number.

What’s your relationship like with your researchers? I imagine that’s a very intimate relationship.
Absolutely. I have a production company called Five by Eight Productions, and it came about because as a comedian, I wrote all my jokes on five by eight cards. My house was cluttered with five by eight cards, and when my films started getting into festivals, I needed a name for my production company. And I was like, five by eight? I just looked around the apartment. My partner at the company is a guy named Michael Connors. He’s a co-producer on the film, and Mike is an Army vet like me. He went to Harvard and ROTC, an Army Ranger guy. We met at grad school at Columbia and we bonded instantly. And we’ve done all of our films together. When I work on his films, I do second unit stuff. We have an interesting production company where we’re both directors, so we both develop stuff internally. If his stuff gets greenlit, I co-produce, I’m like his creative, his right brain. And when I get something greenlit, he’s my kind of creative brain. So Mike Connors was a big part of this. He helped me with a lot of research and then there’s archival producers. I had four or five archival producers on this over the course of four years. It was just a lot it was a lot to go through. You know, I was very adamant that I wanted to tell the story as authentically as possible with as much footage as possible. I hope you all enjoyed the footage we dug up! It was a lot of work.

Do you have a favorite Yogi-ism?
Oh, goodness. I mean, I love them all. I like the ones that are more philosophical. I love that one where he said, “we’re lost, but we’re making great time.” That’s my life in a nutshell! And “nobody goes to that restaurant anymore; it’s too crowded.”  It’s great. Those are some of my favorites, but it was tough.. We didn’t know where to put the Yogi-isms at first. Initially I had them in the third sequence right after the break. Baseball is only about thirty minutes of the film, at least with Yogi playing. I was very adamant that I didn’t want to make a baseball movie. I didn’t want to make a sports movie. I mean, I love sports and I love baseball, but I wanted to make a movie about a life well-lived and about a whole picture of the American Dream encapsulated in 98 minutes. I felt strongly that we had to get out of baseball as soon as possible. The Yogi-isms were initially going to open up the third sequence, but they just didn’t fit there. I moved them much later and they’re in the sixth sequence now. Stuff like that you have to move around a bit. The Jackie Robinson thing became such a meal, it became such a nice thing, that whole safe/out thing which I loved. And his relationship with Jackie was really great. They played minor league ball against each other. Yogi was in Newark and Jackie was in Montreal and they were both veterans. They really bonded over that. I really wanted to highlight that relationship as well.

Is being a Veteran a connection with Yogi Berra that you took very seriously?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, that is another connection. I was a first responder down at Ground Zero after the attacks of September 11th. We spent twelve hours a day down there. The first two weeks down there were really intense. And I was tasked I with escorting some of the remains out in bags and over to the morgue, I was in charge of that. So, dealing with that and finding out that Yogi was pulling bodies out of the water and after D-Day and Normandy, I was like.. I’m sorry, I don’t want to bring everyone down. But I did really want to really dig into that because I think that set the tenor for a big chunk of the rest of his life. He grew up very fast. And something we didn’t get into the film was actually some of the braver stuff he did. After Normandy, he stayed on. They went and had more battles in North Africa and he kept on going and fighting. That didn’t make it into the movie but the D-Day thing was so appropriate and people know about it. He didn’t know how to swim! And he really did think like, oh, rocket boats, is that Buck Rogers? He had this childlike wonder that was so great and I hope it comes through in the film. He had really tapped into some sort of universal truth, I like to say. He just had no filter. That to me was so fantastic to kind of delve into. I had a blast making this film, even if I was killing myself while making it.  My mom says that I’m not happy unless I’m miserable. And I say, Mom, that’s a Yogi-ism.

Q&A with Austin and Meredith Bragg

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game.

I want to start out by talking about how you got the idea to do this. How do you collaborate to come up with this incredible work that we just saw?
Meredith Bragg: We’re not entirely sure where we first learned that pinball was illegal in many cities, and that there was this man in 1976 with this insane mustache who helped legalize it in New York City. The idea sat on a Google doc that we have just full of embryonic ideas. And we… cold-emailed Roger. I’ll do this occasionally. I’ll just cold-email people who I think I may want to pull the thread of a story that may may be interesting. And I, I got on the phone with him for about three hours, and when I was done, I texted Austin and said I think this might be a feature because he had told us about all of the other things that were happening. We’re not pinball people. But I had read enough about the story before I talked to him that I sort of knew the basics of what was happening at the time. But he told us about GQ, about Ellen and about Seth, about writing the book. He was very candid, very early on about who he felt like he was when he first got to New York and who he became around the time of this sort of first scene. Pinball is a very selfish thing: he just wanted a machine for himself and he didn’t care about anything else. And then through the process of writing a book and opening up and meeting these people, he felt he felt like he wanted to be in the game. And so that was that was the genesis, I think. And then we pitched it with a number of other ideas to MPI films, and they initially pitched it with a number of other film concepts. They had told us no biopics, no period pieces, because this is going to be a tier zero film. So a low budget entity. But they gravitated towards it just as much as we did. And we proceeded to spend, cumulatively, days on Zoom with Roger, because this was during covid… early covid: I had emailed him in February 2020. So we we spent a lot of time with him, with Alan and Seth, with James, the photographer, with other people around who knew Roger or knew GQ or things around that time… and out of all that came this!

We end up creating something that’s much better than I think one of us could do alone.

Can you talk a bit about how you collaborate, as co-directors and co-writers?
Austin Bragg: Oh, it’s awful. We have, I think, what is probably one of the more inefficient writing processes you’ll find. I say this because both of us will walk away after we have come up with our basic outline and write an entire script independently. And then we will sit down with a physical copy and hand it to the other person with our stack of highlighters. So I will take Meredith’s script and he will take mine and we will go through and highlight all the things that they did better than me, write everything that Meredith did better than me. I will highlight and I’ll grumble a little bit because it’s still a competition. And then we’ll actually trade it back. And so I now have my original scripts with all the things that he highlighted, and I will go in with a different highlighter and highlight all of the things that Meredith didn’t realize were brilliant.And after we’ve done that process, then we fight. And depending on how close together the scripts are and when our deadline is, sometimes we do that again, and sometimes we’ll go immediately into creating a single hybrid version. Again, not an efficient process by any means, but so far it seems to be working for us and it gives us a little bit of an out, right? When something is not working; when I hit a scene and I’m stuck, or I just don’t like what I’ve done. There’s a good chance that Meredith has already figured out, and vice versa. If both of us have stumbled at the same point, then usually that means there’s something wrong with our outline, right? That there’s something wrong with the structure of it that we have to go back and address. So, not a great process, but that’s where we are.

Meredith Bragg: Yeah, we we outline heavily before we do this so that it’s not so we’re not diverging greatly. I mean, occasionally you’ll diverge in the writing process. You may, as you combine a scene or something just to get things smooth. But most of the time we know, okay, we’re going from this scene to this scene to this scene, so we can play around within that scene and not break the whole story. So it becomes… that highlighting becomes sort of, “oh, I want to steal that from what Austin did…” or, “I really like that line,” or, “I like that scene description,” or, “you know… that is a funny way to get into the scene, and it’s better than what I did.” So when we get the chance, it’s always great to steal the other person’s good ideas and then try another draft as often as we can. We do that, and we end up creating something that’s much better than I think one of us could do alone.

Did you actually have a pinball machine with you, as you were writing? Did you spend a lot of time playing, and did you find that helpful, if you did?
AB: So neither of us own a pinball machine, but we did – through Roger and some connections – we met up with Joe Said, so he runs an arcade in Maryland called Spinners Pinball Arcade, and we actually brought our families to Spinners in the middle of lockdown and, you know, bought the place out for a few hours so our kids could run around and play games… and we went into the back where the first thing I saw was a giant “Sharpshooter” machine, which is that machine with Roger as the cowboy. And we talked to Joe for a while about the machines, and everything about the maintenance of the machines, and all of the inner workings. He actually he let us walk home with a playfield, just the top playfield and some pinballs – a little tube of pinballs. And we took them to Meredith’s place and set up our camera and started playing around with, you know, how to film inside these machines in a way that, you know, we weren’t going to have time to mess around once you were on set. We knew that. So we had it in our head how exactly we wanted to get it through shooting, but we still don’t have pinball machines. We threatened to, but our wives, I don’t think like that very much. These are loud machines!

Is it hard to be a pinball wizard?

AB: It’s impossible. I mean, we’ve been on the circuit with Roger, and Roger’s in his seventies now, and, you know, he’ll tell you that he’s not the player he used to be. You know, it’s insane watching him play. In fact, some of the shots that you see in the film are Roger. Because we need somebody who can hit that shot on the pinball machine, you know, with a camera right in his face, and him down in a weird angle. He’ll do it in one, right? It would take me all day.

MB: We were told that real pinball players would know just by the spin of the ball, whether you’re throwing it or whether there’s a magnet underneath pushing it. And we knew we didn’t… we wanted to make a movie that the pinball community could embrace, but that anyone could watch. That wasn’t just… there’s been a lot of documentaries that the pinball community has embraced. But they’re very much geared for that community. We wanted something with wider appeal, but so one of the things we did is we said, “well, we’ve got to actually have someone making these shots.” And we didn’t have the time to set up a shot and insert and try twenty times and hit it once. So Roger happened to be on set that day and we thought, “Roger, come on over here.” So there are these great photos, behind the scenes photos, of this camera set up, this huge rig, and Roger’s just sort of somehow gotten his body in a position where he can hit it, and he just nails it. It was… he’s really, really good. We did a newscast hit – where was that? And Roger and I were on local news and they had set up a pinball machine there. And so they wanted to start playing as a teaser. So he starts playing. And then the commercials are done, and they’re back with us. He has to… he basically has to lose on purpose because he’s still playing that first ball! After you know, ninety seconds, or two minutes or whatever. So, I mean, he’s excellent. Whereas if we were doing it, the whole entire game would be done in about twenty seconds.

Q&A with Andrea Pallaoro, Trace Lysette, and Patricia Clarkson

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

Andrea, this is your third feature and a lot of your films have been led by women. I’d love to hear how you developed the script.
Andrea Pallaoro: Well, it’s a film that I had envisioned as part of a much larger exploration on the traumas and the dynamics of what it means to feel abandoned and the consequences of that. I really believe that the experience of abandonment, of not being seen, of not being recognized for who you are, is something that shapes so much of our relationship with the world around us, but also with our own sense of identity. And I think it’s something that we can all relate to in one way or another. Through the story of Monica, I think we can recognize ourselves through a much more extreme paradigm. But we can see so much of who we are and what we have experienced as well. That was really the main impulse for that in this story, and it’s really inspired by the story of a very dear friend of mine. It’s not her story, but it draws a lot of parallels with it.

Finding the truth is what we always want to do.

The role of Monica is a massive undertaking as she’s in almost every scene in the film, and she’s the conduit for the audience. What was the casting process like?
AP: It was clear that the most significant choice I could make was in finding the person that could bring this character to life. You know, the person I could actually embark on this journey with. And it was a very, very long process. I saw so many candidates for the role. And it was a search that wasn’t limited to the U.S., but expanded all over the world. When I met Trace, I immediately knew I had found who I was looking for. I found the person that had the all the characteristics to bring this person to life on the screen. That was the first time I felt like, oh, my God, yes. Now we’re talking.

And Patricia was always in the back of my mind because we had met a few years prior at a film festival in Marrakesh., I was such a big fan of her work. And her career and the characters that she brought to the big screen. It’s always been a dream of mine to work with her. But it’s one of those things that, you know, you think they’re just dreams. You don’t expect them to actually become reality. Even though when we were in Marrakesh, we did talk about how wonderful it would be to work together one day. Once we cast Trace, I sent the script to Patty and offered her the role, and the rest is history.

What was it that convinced you so quickly to accept the role of Eugenia?
Patricia Clarkson: So many different things. The lack of dialogue, the challenge of conveying a dying character with very little words. And also, it was not lost on me that it would give an extraordinary transgender actress an extraordinary opportunity. And that meant something to me.

Trace, what were your first impressions of the script and the character of Monica?
Trace Lysette: Well, I think the first thing was that, oh, it’s the title character and that’s rare for trans actor. And I had been working in TV for ten years, for a while. It seemed like a great opportunity. Then I read the script, and I loved it. Those things that Andrea described earlier, I felt similarly. I started auditioning and eventually they asked for some notes. I gave some notes. We had some dinners. I auditioned more. My favorite thing about Monica was her quiet strength and knowing that this was a well-lived trans character—not a transition story. It was not a story about youth, no shade! This is a woman who has lived on her own for a long time without the love from her biological family. And that’s a theme that is unfortunately common in the trans community. I think we all experience it to varying degrees. If you don’t, you’re lucky. And that was what struck me the most about her.

I imagine as an actor it’s a privilege if the director actually wants notes and wants your input. But also as a director, if you have somebody who’s lived a character that you haven’t lived, it’s probably also a privilege to have that input.
AP: Absolutely. It’s the most extraordinary opportunity for the creative process, to be informed by the real life. I always want my collaborators to bring that to the work.

TC: I think the collaboration was wonderful. I mean, I felt safe with Andrea, and he’s a very gentle artist, a gentle person. That made me feel safer to explore and to act and to bring the truth. Finding the truth is what we always want to do.

PC: I didn’t have any notes. I just said, oh God, I’m dying. And I’m going to have no makeup on and have no words. I can’t wait! No, it was one of the most glorious, most extraordinary experiences I’ve had in my career. And it’s so near and dear to my heart, this film. I was lucky.

Was there anything that changed in the script after you two met?
AP: Well, yes, absolutely. Even in the production process there were a lot of moments where it was immediately clear to me that Trace’s own experiences and how she saw the character were going to provide even more depth to the character that I had envisioned. And there are a number of moments in the film where her improvisation really surprised me and elevated the material so much. I am thinking especially about the conversations on the phone with Jimmy. With most of them, there was of course very specific information to convey. But most of those conversations actually were improvised.

TL: It’s like a hybrid. Yes.

Patricia, your character doesn’t have a lot of dialogue or a lot of movement in the film.  But you do an amazing job of conveying and communicating while lying in that bed, with your facial expressions. How challenging is that?
PC: I think it’s an organic process in that there wasn’t a lot of okay, you’re going to have this and that and you’re going to be this way. You’re it. It started to oddly come to me. I knew that brain cancer may take you in many ways, but what was most important was the emotional life of this woman. That was first and foremost. Yes, she’s debilitated. Yes, she’s immobile. All of those things are very important. She’s dying. She’s in the last months of her life. But what was most important was her emotional life. And it is the most important part of an actor’s journey with any character you play. Finding that with Trace, which came very easily, was a win-win. I didn’t have to reach. I loved that this character in the last months of her life had this profound experience of finding unconditional love for her child. She dies with that in her heart and her child lives the rest of her life with her mother’s love. We can all relate to that in some way.

AP: I have to add to that because to me, the best moments of cinema are where you can understand a character just by observing them. And without the aid of dialogue, those moments have so much power and let you understand things not so much intellectually, but emotionally. When you work with extraordinary artists like Trace and Patricia, the opportunities to do that and to find those moments happen daily.

Can you talk about choosing the aspect ratio?
AP: We wanted to find a cinematic language that could articulate the sense of claustrophobia and codependence that I wanted to explore through the character of Monica. We explored the various aspect ratios and compositions, and we realized that the one that would convey these emotions and that would enhance this exploration was a very square like aspect ratio. More like portrait photography and one that prioritizes the body and the face over the landscape.

How did you work with your DP, and for the actors, what was it like to be shot so intimately?
AP: Kate [Arizmendi] is an artist with a capital A. It was very exciting to dissect images during the two months of pre-production when we might spend like eight or nine hours a day on location exploring the space, thinking about what each scene and each shot needed to needed to convey. It was really a process of shooting the film in our minds and preparing ourselves for that cinematic language so that when we got to set we felt really sure of that exploration and we were open to new possibilities. But in order to feel that that openness, you need to do the homework and be ready for it.

TL: It was challenging at times. I love Kate. She’s probably the most vocal DP I’ve ever worked with in my career. We found our groove and I appreciated her artistry. We didn’t shoot in sequence and watching it back the first cut, I thought, oh, if I’d known they were going to be on the corner of my lip in this shot, I would have done this instead because I’m trying to layer the character and showcase different parts of her over the course of the film. And what I realized is I didn’t have control over that at all! And so that was something I had to experience and learn while doing this. My road map for the character was different from Kate’s, different from Andrea’s, but it’s incredible how it all comes together at the end, like a true collaboration.

PC: I didn’t know when I was on camera or not and I didn’t care. I mean, I did but I didn’t. I would go into that weird place when I get on the set, where I didn’t know where the camera was and it was maybe for the best. As long as my dog was in frame, that’s all I needed to know!  It was very freeing for me as an actor.

Q&A with Melissa Barrera, Nicholas Britell, and Benjamin Millepied

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

Did you find it helpful to engage with the previous iterations of the story when you were preparing for this film?
Nicholas Britell: Well, what was interesting, actually, was that when Benjamin first told me that he had this inspiration to to do Carmen, my first instinct was that I actually didn’t want to adapt or rearrange Bizet at all. And I was obviously familiar with the opera. Benjamin and I talked extensively about things like the Pushkin epic poem and and the inspirations for libretto. But I also thought it was really important to follow Benjamin’s instinct for this; you know, there have been so many incredible adaptations of Carmen over the years in so many different guises, and that I felt strongly that if Benjamin is going to do this musically, I wanted it to be something completely different.

Melissa Barrera: I would say the same for myself. I didn’t want to… There’s just been so many iterations of this story that I didn’t want to subconsciously copy it, if I watched other things. So I stayed away from everything. I was familiar with the opera, but not enough. Like, I didn’t know anything other than I think Habanera, and I don’t… like, I don’t think I knew the music of the opera very well; I’d never seen it. But… it has such a big presence in Latin America. In Mexico, where I grew up, there was a commercial for soap, like cleaning soap, that used the Habanera song and changed the lyrics for that, for the soap. So it’s just been present for me, for a long time. I know that it’s huge and I know the the Carmen character, the essence of it. So I just wanted her to be mine.

talking about the film and the process makes me want to get back on set as soon as possible.

Can you describe the process you went through to prepare these dances?
MB: Yeah, it was getting comfortable with the dances enough that I didn’t have to think about the steps when I was in there, so that I could focus on the storytelling and what she’s feeling as she’s dancing, more than like, “Oh, did I do the right step? Did I turn the right way?” So it was just like drilling it well.

Benjamin Millepied: Yeah, I think it’s so impressive, particularly in the in the dance with all the other women, because you see Melissa dancing with all these professional dancers. And yet I find that your dancing is freer, you know, than all of them, which was really incredible, you know? Yeah. Really amazing sequence, considering she doesn’t take dance classes at all!

MB: Well, I have a funny story about that! I was mortified at one point, because Benjamin went out to Australia and started sending me videos that he was choreographing with these professional dancers, with the Sydney Dance Company dancers, the best dancers in all of Sydney. And he would send me videos and I’d be freaking out because I was like, “I’m not going to be able to do that. How do you expect me to do that?” If you’re choreographing with professional dancers and I get there and there’s this dance in the desert where I’m dancing with five of those girls and I’m in the middle… and I was like, “How am I going to look better than these girls?” So that was the dance that I think had me the most worried. We were shooting that and it was raining that day and we kept having to stop because our lights, you know, there was thunder, and for safety. And so I was just losing my mind in the trailer because I just wanted to get it over with, and finally it stopped raining. And I was like, “I’m going to slip because the floor is wet… I’m going to slip and fall.” And it was a oner as you can see. I don’t know if you noticed, but the the camera in that sequence doesn’t cut. It’s like one continuous take where you you can’t hide in a oner. It’s kind of… and when you cut, you can cut if someone made a mistake, you cut out of that scene and you use one where you didn’t. But for this it was… I knew it was going to be a oner and I was so nervous about that. We did a take, and then we did another one, and and Benjamin cuts, and he comes to me and he’s like, “How did you do that?” And I said, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “How did you… how did you do that? That was so good. You were flying.” I was like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” I kind of just had an out-of-body experience. I’m glad you liked it because I don’t know what happened! And so it was kind of like one of those magical moments where everything kind of just… it was the pressure of like, we don’t have much time. It’s about to be sunrise. We have to get this done. It doesn’t stop raining. And I think it all kind of worked out for the best.

The movie looks great, but it also sounds incredible. One of the most remarkable thing about the dance sequences is how much in the foreground the shuffling of feet and the breathing of the actors is. How early on was that part of your idea? Did you compose with that in mind?
NB: I mean, and I can say a lot about the sound. We had an incredible sound team, led by Niv Adiri, who’s a genius, and and actually one of the first people that I remember recommending to Benjamin was Niv, because I felt… for something that was really intended to be a, you know, a visual and aural experience, I wanted to make sure that the sound and the sound mix was really, really special. But, you know, as far as the the dances and the music, the on-camera music, that was something that Benjamin and I started talking about literally, you know, I mean, it might have been like ten years ago! Actually, I found an email from Benjamin from ten years ago that said, “I want I want to make Carmen.” Yeah, but it was, you know, it was a long process actually, to figure out all the on camera music. It started with just us talking about things and feeling… trying different experiments, I would say. And then we brought on these incredible collaborators: Julieta Venegas and Taura Stinson and The D.O.C., and that’s really when the songs kind of took their their shape, I think. And I was really curious myself, like, how they were going to look. Because I remember… Benjamin is so trusting and supportive as a director, of his crew. And I remember in particular with The D.O.C., that final huge, you know, rapping fight match that that happens. I remember saying to myself, “you know, I wonder if Benjamin’s going to want a lot of changes in it?” Because this is such a complex choreography. Like I can’t imagine. And and when he listen to it, he just said, “This is great. We’re there.” And I was like, okay, great. And I remember doing it and he shot it. And it’s what we wrote beforehand, you know, and I think that’s such a fascinating testament to Benjamin that he was able to, you know, he worked with this piece and crafted this whole sequence in a film right around that. And it’s true to the film and it’s true to the song. And I remember thinking to myself, that was really kind of remarkable that he were able to take this song and turn it into a whole scene.

This is an incredible challenge to take on, for your directorial debut.
BM: You know, I have to say in hindsight, like I just loved the process of the day-to-day. Like every day on set something goes wrong, and every day you show up, you’ve got to be pragmatic and actually embrace these issues. They’re there. They’re just issues that push you to be more creative. And frankly, I don’t mind it at all. I enjoyed it. I really… talking about the film and the process makes me want to get back on set as soon as possible. No, it’s… it’s really… you have to solve things every day, every day stuff for different reasons. And you have to find solutions. And if you surround yourself really well, you’ll have other people who will find good solutions for you. And what it forces you to do is try to go to the essential and actually strip away what you don’t need. But what is the essential stuff? And how can you figure that out, and do it with less and less time and less, you know? So it’s a fantastic process. I mean, I think maybe I particularly thrive on, like, restraint and how to be creative with restraint. So I just really loved it.

MB: We were… I just want to tell this story because we were you know, always running against the clock — as you usually are in movies, unless you’re like, you know, a big director that has all the time and money in the world to make a movie. But but for the most part, you’re rushing and trying to get things in with the light that you have, or so that you don’t have to do a forced call or whatever. So you’re always kind of tense. And Ben always would release that tension, because every time that we would be in between setups, he’d play awesome music over the speakers. So there was always music playing, and everyone was so relaxed because of it. But then also, when we were shooting the dance in the desert — the final sequence in the sunset — we had like a thirty or forty minute window to shoot that sequence, because the light was just right for that amount of time. And and we were in a red sand desert where the camera needed to see in 360. There was a limited crew because we had like a tiny little tent because the camera had to see all the way around. Base camp was thirty minutes away so that the camera could see the entire, you know, desert. And we had to dance, and then clean the dirt so that you didn’t see the footsteps of the previous take. And so it would be like a whole reset of that. You know, the crew would be sweeping, and Ben would grab a broom and sort of sweep and dance in between setups. And that is just like the definition of who Ben is as a director, just like… Joy and teamwork. And generosity and all the best things. It was such an amazing experience.

Q&A with Kelly Reichardt

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

How did you go from making First Cow to telling a story like Showing Up?
Kelly Reichardt: Well, both films were written with Jonathan Raymond and we started out with this idea of making a film of this little-known Canadian painter, Emily Carr. We wanted to focus on a ten-year period of her life when she was a landlord. She had sort of bought this building and become a landlord because she thought it would give her more time away from day jobs and leave to more time to paint. And then we took the ferry to Vancouver and we learned that she was a hugely famous painter in Canada. Do you guys know Emily Carr? She’s huge in Canada.

It’s true! I’m Canadian. She’s huge! There’s a school named after her, right?

KR: Yeah, there’s an art school. And we stayed at the Emily Carr hotel. But you don’t hear as much about her here in the states. It’s like saying you’ve never heard of Norman Rockwell. There are statues of her up. She’s amazing. But we didn’t want to make a film about a famous painter! We came back closer to our own world and started focusing on artists we knew that were working in areas we knew. There was this school, Oregon College of Arts and Crafts, which is an art school. You don’t get a BA or anything. It’s purely art on the docket. Those types of schools have been closing down around America and this school which is like 105 years old had also shuttered its doors. It’s a really important institution for people doing pottery and crafts in the Pacific Northwest. We wanted to film in this place before it ceased to exist, and because of Covid we were able to do that.

Pottery has a lot of inside politics!

Can you talk about recreating that environment?
KR: It was pretty cool because it was completely empty and so I went there with the art director and we measured out the rooms and made a big floor plan. I had that in my apartment and we got to make up what the school would be. There were some clues in some of the rooms like, okay, there are sinks, so that’s the dye room. And then one of the first times that I visited the school, there was a giant loom. I mean, a giant loom that would take up this whole wall. But then that disappeared. Things were just kind of being moved out of the school. And another art facility gave us the rooms to use. We were just making up what this school would be. I’d been teaching at Bard College—which is a liberal arts school like NYU—for the last 17 years. I’d been interested in the Black Mountain College of Arts for a long time and I’d visited what is now a boys camp. I had a lot of ideas about what would be in the rooms. And we knew lots of people who went to school there. Then Tony Gasparro (the production designer) started inviting young artists and recent graduates of art school to come and make the art that would be the students’ art in the film. And so little by little, all the rooms started filling up and art started getting made. It was pretty cool. One of our production assistants knew how to use the looms and taught everybody how to use the looms because the loom woman had Covid! All the young actors had a long time to just hang out with nothing to do, so they all started learning—getting into the clay and getting into the dying, and they were learning everything. Then I’d like walk around and everybody would be teaching me how to do stuff. It became a totally active place before we started shooting. There were people making stuff in every room. It was so cool to see it go from nothing to being. It made you think like, oh, someone should put an art school here, a lot of people want to study art! One of my colleagues from Bard, Ben Coonley, made the sort of Buckminster Fuller-like dome. He came and did the projections and worked with the art department. It was great. That was like the hive. The whole thing was making an art school come to life.

What caused you to think of Michelle Williams for this project?
KR: One thing that helped me see Michelle in the part was in this collection of artists and sculptors. I had this image of Lee Bontecou when she was about Michelle’s age. She looks so much like Michelle, and that helped me see Michelle in the part. So aside from, you know, that I wanted to work with Michelle and I wanted to work with John Magaro, and I had to consider, how are these people related? Then came Maryann Plunkett and Judd Hirsch to make that family make sense. Michelle kind of waded in with Cynthia Lahti, whose art she’s making at first, virtually. Cynthia’s important and Michelle was in New York for a few months. And then I sent her like ten pounds of clay and some tools. And she waded into it and then she came to Portland and just started spending days in Cynthia’s studio. We then moved everything in Cynthia’s studio to that garage space. There are some houses and apartments that friends of mine built and sold to their artist friends there, and they’ve been passed down to various artists. I’ve stayed there too. I knew those spaces really well and that was for sort of planning how that would all go.

How has your relationship with Michelle changed over the course of making four films together?
KR: She goes off and works on a lot of things and I’ve made things in between the films I’ve done with her. But then you get together and I sort of reap the benefit from everything she’s been working on and learning in between. I mean, when I was watching Fosse/Verdon, I was just like, oh my God, Michelle can do so much more than I’m eking out! We were being a bit braver in a way than we were when we were younger because I think I had more trust in myself to start bigger and then pull stuff back as opposed to starting where you want to end up. Honestly, Michelle’s always been so trusting, which is an amazing thing. She’s just always been really trusting, which is the best thing you could ask for from your actors—that they trust you. Michelle always did, which was a big gift.

How did André Benjamin (André 3000) become involved?
KR: I was working with the casting director Gayle Keller and she sent me tons of images and somehow André ‘s picture got mixed in with the regular people pictures! And I had him on my wall with some of the sculptors, and over time, you know because you see pictures of him in his overalls, he just became Eric the kiln guy. I guess he took my number and he called and was like, hey, what’s going on? What you got going on? And I said, I want you to be this kiln guy. He was just up for it. He went out to Long Beach, to Cal State, and I had made a short film there, a 16mm film of the artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, who was out there working. They have huge kilns. I mean, they have enormous kilns and different kinds. Right after I was there filming, they got to know some of the people there and Jessica worked there. They said André could come—which wasn’t hard to talk them into. They would teach him how to work the kilns. I thought he’d go in and spend a day. After the first day he was like, oh my God, clay, I knew I needed to be doing this! He kept going back and making stuff. He would walk around whenever he wasn’t shooting, playing this wooden flute that he carries around with him and it was kind of always wafting in. On the last day at this school, I asked him if I could record him playing, and he went out in a field and he played for like 45 minutes. The crew sat around and listened to him and we recorded him and it was beautiful. I had that to work with in the editing room.

There’s this inherent power dynamic in the landlord/tenant situation between Lizzy and Jo, but there’s so much nuance and complexity to that relationship. Can you talk about that?
KR: I’m hesitant to in case in resonates differently for different people. When I was starting out in New York, we had an office on Lafayette Street. Killer Films was there, but it was called Apparatus at that time. And there were a lot of people in that building who could never afford to be in that building now. But I was in this building with all these filmmakers, and they all had trust funds and I didn’t. I could only be in that office because my friends let me have a desk there and work there. They all helped me get my first film made; they were so generous to me. Anything that happened that was good for any of us was good for all of us. I’m always saying this to my students: what you want to graduate with is people you want to make films with. We still go to each other for notes for our films. You need that. And a lot of those people blew through their trust funds helping people like me! But it’s never an even playing field regardless… race, sex, gender, money, connections. It’s like in the art world. Even in small ways, someone’s family is more draining than someone else’s family, you know, just in all the ways that one person’s life is more complicated. You know, when I think back, if someone had given me money to make a second film after my first film, I would not have known how to negotiate any of those things. All the things that come with making a film that are outside making a film, I had no idea how to negotiate that world. Some people totally know how to do it. I didn’t want to make a film about filmmaking, that’s for sure. But I do like the idea of how small politics are in everything. The original thinking when we came back from the Emily Carr trip came about when I was in L.A. with some friends and I went to these two different dinners where everyone was gossiping about the politics at the ceramic space. Like, who’s sleeping with the kiln guy? They’re getting the better space in the kiln and someone else’s stuff got burnt because they’re getting the short end of the stick. It was all about the kiln and space. I called John Raymond and was like, pottery has a lot of inside politics! This is so exciting, you know? Anyway, I think Lizzy and Jo really like each other’s work and that doesn’t mean you don’t have your moments of being like, we’re in a small town and there’s only so many people’s attention to get.  When you write a grant, there’s only so much money in the world, and who’s going to get it?