5 Questions with Ryan McGlade
1) What have you been up to since we last spoke about "Bennifer" in January?
I’ve been working on a few projects, mainly a new short that’s now in the sound design process. Right now, like a lot of people, I’m trying to stay inside and wash my hands as much as possible.
2) What’s the backstory here - what was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?
A few years ago I decided to develop a project with my friends Mark Baker and Molly Wurwand, both actors whom I’d worked with in the past but who hadn’t previously acted together. They’re two of the most intuitive improvisers I’ve ever met, and I felt like they’d have a great dynamic with one another. The three of us developed an outline of the story and the characters out of a scene that the two of them improvised, which we later reshot as the scene where Larry visits Larissa’s apartment in the film. Separately, I worked with Linda Holston around that time on a short project for a 16mm film workshop with Mono No Aware, which ultimately became the opening nightmare sequence of Larry Larissa Linda and helped solidify Linda’s character for me. From these two strands the story kind of snowballed, and we ended up incorporating a larger cast of characters. It was a lot of fun to develop the therapy group and the people that Larry and Larissa encounter separately as they go through the day. We shot the bulk of the film initially over a few days, but as I started editing it and the tone and narrative became more clear to me, we ended up doing a few pickup shoots to flesh it out.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And, on the flip side, what was the easiest part?
The biggest challenge was definitely editing it – we shot the film primarily in 2017, and I’d been cutting it intermittently since then until finishing it this past month. I love the spontaneity and manic energy that working with improvisation can bring, but since we had so much of that, from a post-production standpoint it was difficult at times to sift through all the material and find the tiny moments that the film hinges on. Ultimately, I’m really happy with what that process yielded, but it did take a while. The easiest part was working with the actors. It felt like a real return to the kind of filmmaking that we do as kids – on the fly, a general idea of what will happen, one handheld camera and no lights (aside from the opening sequence, which we shot separately). It was a little bit more of a set than those kinds of organic backyard filmmaking experiences – we did have a production sound crew on most of the shoot days – but the spirit of the set as a whole felt a lot freer and more fun than can sometimes be the case. That’s ideally how every filmmaking experience should feel, and it was like magic to have that feeling around such talented people.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
The other day, I watched Rohmer’s Autumn Tale, which just destroyed me. The internal drama of taking chances at happiness that you feel so deeply to be uncharacteristic of your personality – it hit home. Béatrice Romand’s performance in it is maybe now my favorite of any of the Rohmer films that I’ve seen. It’s beautiful to me how Rohmer approached these long-running collaborations with actors over the years. He was able to dissect so thoroughly different problems at different stages of life with the same people, because he understood what kind of subtleties they could explore together in a way that’s very mysterious to me.
5) What’s next for you?
I’m in the process of sound designing my next short and developing a feature script.
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IG: @ryan_mcglade
Twitter: @ryanmcglade