5 Questions with Kati Skelton
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I'm from a suburb of Chicago called St. Charles. I did a bunch of theater growing up, but I don't remember thinking that filmmaking was even an option as kid. And then when I got to college that I started seeing movies that really blew my mind. I remember watching Wild at Heart and Funky Forest and Songs from the Second Floor and being like...this is insane. My school had an on-campus movie theater and I worked there for a few years doing print trafficking and invoicing and some other administrative stuff and I took a bunch of film history courses but it still didn't really feel like it was something I could do. Instead I gravitated toward comedy, I moved to New York and was performing a lot but secretly wanted to be writing and directing. Eventually I got miserable enough not doing the thing I wanted to do and I wrote a super short script called Door on the Left and worked up the nerve to ask my friend Harrison Atkins if he wanted to work on it with me. He said yes, and he introduced me to all the people I still collaborate with to this day, including on this movie!
2) What’s the backstory here - what was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?
When I first wrote this script it was actually about two scientists, not ceramicists. I worked on it for awhile but I just couldn't make it work for some reason, so I kept coming back to it, trying to figure out how to make it gel. I got busy with some other projects, but then a project that had been full steam ahead suddenly fell through, and I had a ton of energy that needed to go somewhere. I picked up the script again but with the eyes of "how can I make this thing in the easiest possible way?" I couldn't think of a way to get a laboratory for the scientist script. So I wrote a list of locations I thought I could get free or affordable access to, and one of them was "pottery studio" because my friend Julia Callahan was working at Clayworks on Columbia in Brooklyn. Once I started thinking of the characters as ceramicists instead of scientists, the rest of the script fell into place. And we did shoot at Clayworks and Julia was our pottery supervisor!
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?
The biggest challenge was probably that we had to shoot the thing over the course of a year for actor/crew availability and budget reasons. It would have been better if we could have just shot the whole thing at once, it's so hard to ramp up production multiple times and then have huge stretches of time in between. We had three different DPs! Definitely the motto with this movie was just "whatever it takes to get it made without ruining people's lives." I wanted the experience to be really fun and not stressful because I had been too stressed out on my last couple projects so I tried my best not to be too precious with it. I think that's what the movie wanted too, because it's this story of this artist who is driven insane by jealousy of her partner who is getting rewarded by this institution they are participating in, and I was getting driven insane from trying to get the entertainment industry to give me a chance to make something. And the lesson is maybe to just let go of all that, just have fun, so that's what I tried to do.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
A movie I saw this year that I wish I had watched sooner that completely blew me away was The Taste of Tea, written and directed by Katsuhito Ishii (he also made Funky Forest which I mentioned earlier). It is the most peaceful movie I have ever seen, it left me with the most sublime appreciation for being alive. I wish I could have that feeling every day. I would love to make something so ecstatically peaceful like that.
5) What’s next for you?
I'm working on some feature scripts! Who knows what the future will bring but I hope to make some more movies.
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http://katiskelton.com