5 Questions with Pisie Hochheim
Pisie Hochheim (right) with Tony Oswald (left)
1) Can you talk briefly about your backgrounds, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I always loved movies growing up and the video section of my small town's library was surprisingly well stocked with things like the Dardenne bros and Spike Lee which had a big impact, but I also studied French for 7 years from middle school on and I was a bit of a francophile so I would lean into that section for the language and culture but it lead me to Varda, Godard, the new wave stuff and later Bresson and Akerman which deepened my appreciation. But I majored in Human Rights in college so I came to filmmaking as a career only after working for a couple of years in the nonprofit sector in NYC. I hated my job and decided to quit without a plan. Luckily I landed both in a film-adjacent job and with Tony (Oswald, co-director) who happened to be a film editor. I grew more interested in the process and took The Edit Center's six week Art of Editing class and made my way into the industry through post-production.
2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?
This idea grew from a story that Tony's sister, Crystal, told to him about her son finding an old video camera with the only known footage of his father who he's never met. Tony asked her to write it down and she wrote a short story that was complicated, beautiful, sad and really dug deep into the varied emotions that moment brought up in her. It also addressed the many different ways she considered handling the situation even while she couldn't talk openly about it with her son because he was so young. We loved the themes the story explored, and her real-life dynamic with her son, and decided one winter break to make the short story into a film.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?!
As with many of our projects, we decided to make the film shortly before we shot it. There wasn't a ton of lead time or pre-production so we were scrambling a little bit at first. Jordan, who plays Cassie, was battling a cold and lives in NYC, but jumped on a plane and delivered a beautiful performance. The rest of our crew was similarly game and we were luckily able to put it all together with just two weeks prep (including writing it). The easiest part was that we shot it in our subject's home with complete cooperation from our sister Crystal and our whole crew who worked for free because we just wanted to make something.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
Any movie in the Criterion Collection "Tell Me: Women's Stories, Women Filmmakers" curated by Nellie Killian has been excellent. The most influential of those was probably MIMI but also loved "Janie's Janie" and "Suzanne, Suzanne". Also watched RELIC (2020) recently and thought it was a smart, emotional, and visually disturbing movie. We're both really interested in the mother/daughter relationship and we thought this was a successful exploration of the horror and love of that dynamic. And SHIRLEY by Josephine Decker! I think she's one of the most talented and original filmmakers working today.
5) What’s next for you?
We're actually hunkered down in Kentucky right now and since this is where we make all of our work, we are writing and even shooting some scenes for what we think will be a feature-length film. Since we invested in some equipment last year, we're having fun doing two person crew shoots with family members with whom we're quarantined. We're also revising our feature length script, which is an expansion of Tony's first short film GREAT LIGHT. It's been a blessing to have some time to focus and reassess our goals and to evolve a more fluid filmmaking style where we grab moments we see in the world around us and then construct narratives around them.
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www.sameperson.com
IG: @pisie5
Twitter: @pisiehochheim