5 Questions with Joe Swanberg
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I moved a lot growing up. I was always the new kid. My formative years were in Kentucky, Georgia and Alabama - other than all the moving I would say I had a pretty normal childhood and background. My parents raised me Catholic, I was an altar boy, I loved sports and playing with toys - I always loved movies and would often play movies with my friends. I remember we loved Backdraft and my friends and I would pretend to be firefighters and people trapped in burning buildings and stage elaborate rescues in our bedrooms. We also played The Abyss. They had that liquid oxygen in the film that allowed them to breathe a watery substance, but we would just fill our mouths with orange juice and hold our breaths and pretend we were doing adventures underwater.
I would say I had three big epiphany moments that got me interested in filmmaking. The first was seeing the film The Evil Dead 2 at a sleep over and having the shit scared out of me. Now I see all the comedy in that movie, but at the time, when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old, it was the most intense thing I had ever seen. I developed a new appreciation for the power of film. Then at another sleepover not long after I saw the film Jacob's Ladder - obviously I had no real awareness of Vietnam or PTSD, I was also probably 9 or 10, 3rd or 4th grade, and it was the first time I was truly captivated by a film I didn't understand. It was way above my head, but I also watched the entire film while the rest of my friends lost interest and fell asleep. I was into the performances and the visuals and probably trying really hard to keep up with it.
If you're wondering why I was watching this stuff when I was 9 or 10, there was a place in Georgia that was a pizza place and also a video store - you could order pizza and also a movie and they would deliver them to your house. If we had a sleepover the parents usually just gave us 20 bucks to order pizza and a movie and happily took the night off, so we would always get R-rated movies cause nobody was checking. It's funny to imagine the teenage kid working at the pizza place hearing the voice of a 9 year old asking for an R rated movie and rattling off some titles.
The biggest epiphany moment though was when I saw Raising Arizona freshman year of high school. I absolutely loved it. The sense of humor totally clicked for me, the actors are all amazing, it was just great. That's when I really felt I wanted to spend the rest of my life making, or at least trying to make, movies.
2) What’s the backstory here - what was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?
I was in LA for the release of EASY season 3 and I was hanging out with Jane Adams and she said that she was really into Kent Osborne's pictures from Vermont. Kent had moved there about 6 months earlier and Jane thought we should go and make a movie. We had all worked together before on really small stuff, but once I started making EASY my life sort of got consumed by the show and in between seasons I just needed to chill and parent my kids and catch up with my friends and not try and make more stuff.
But EASY was finished, I was almost through the process of getting divorced, and Kent was turning 50, so it seemed like a great idea to go out to his place and try and make something super small like we used to. Kent and I have birthdays a day apart. He's August 30 and I'm August 31, so it was kind of a birthday treat to myself to take the time and go be in the woods with my friends and get back to the basics of filmmaking.
Also from a business perspective, because I am basically a small business owner with my film career, I was fairly certain that our economy was headed for a collapse. After the 2008 bailout I watched both Democrats and Republicans prop up the system in a way that seemed reckless and unsustainable to me. I had spent 2012 - 2015 having a great deal of success, or maybe luck, independently financing my films and selling them on the open market for a profit. But I had lost confidence in the model. I was extremely fearful to sink a ton of money into a film because it felt that the country was on very shaky ground and something bad was going to happen. I never could have predicted we would be dealing with a mess like this, but the writing was on the wall, and I wanted to see what it was like to make something super tiny again - in the event that I wouldn’t have other options.
We shot Build the Wall in August 2019 and a year later the world is completely different. This kind of production is now actually sustainable and safe and possible to recreate for many filmmakers, so I’m glad I got back in the swing of things. I had a feeling that I might need to do everything - from shooting, recording sound, data management, etc - myself again, like I did in the old days, so this was in some ways devised as a stress test for myself to work from the ground up without the support network I had become accustom to on bigger productions.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the most, and the least?
I would say the only challenge was space - just normal adult shit of being on top of each other and not having enough alone time. We crammed into Kent's house, built a little game plan, then started shooting. We made the film in about 6 days, shooting very casually with almost no equipment. I had a tripod, a borrowed Sony 4K handicam, a shotgun mic with a wind screen, a mic stand and a 25-ft XLR cable to plug straight into the camera.
We cooked and ate together, talked and wrote and modified the film as we went, shot pretty much chronologically, give or take a few things, and just tried to focus on telling a funny, compelling story and making the best film we could. On the final day of shooting I was walking away from the camera and the XLR cable snagged on my belt and it pulled the camera over into the creek, so that caused about an hour delay while we tried to figure out if we could still use the camera. It turned out to be damaged enough that I didn't feel good about using it, so we switched over to someone's phone and shot the end of the movie that way.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
The best thing I've seen recently is Věra Chytilová's 1966 film Daisies. The film was on my radar since film school and I had rented it a few times in the early 2000's but never got around to watching it. Criterion put out that Eclipse box set of Czech New Wave films and when Chicago declared a shelter at home order I used a few of the nights to finally watch a bunch of stuff I had been meaning to see. When I saw Daisies I was immediately mad at myself for not having put it in my brain earlier. It’s so exhilarating. I just loved it - so wild and radical and funny and great. Totally alive and inspiring.
I also love Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. That’s the other film this year that really stands out for me. Exciting, gorgeous, tense, romantic, scary - just an incredible film. I loved every second of it.
5) What’s next for you?
I've been developing a Spanish language TV series to shoot in Mexico City. I got hired to do a TV pilot from someone else's script. I'm working on my own script. I’m producing someone else’s film. Just a bunch of stuff. Now that I'm divorced I have my kids half the time - Jude is 9 and Abby is 5 and parenting during the last six months has been more work than usual - with no end in sight for the sudden challenges of schooling. My kids go to the public school in the neighborhood, but Chicago Public Schools has opted for 5 days a week of remote learning and I’m not OK with my kids spending that much time on a computer, so my ex and I are still trying to figure out what to do even though school starts in a few weeks. I also discovered from talking with CPS IT guys that Google Classroom records every second of every school day to Google servers, which chills me to my bones when I imagine a company with as bad a privacy record as Google having all this video of children to use, so I really don’t want to participate in that, but they are giving us parents no other option. Anyway, it’s hard to focus on film stuff when I’m dealing with all that.
The future of the industry is so uncertain at this time that like most people, I'm working like it will come back to what it used to be eventually, but also prepping for a future where it's entirely different. I'm always trying to think ahead and be predictive, and I think this super small stuff that I have spent most of my career making is probably gonna be the way forward for a while, possibly several years, so I’m just working and thinking small and contained, which I don’t mind at all.
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