“The Ballad of Junior was a lesson of vulnerability for me. I knew every single character in this story. It felt like I was writing a letter to my Mom, my friends, my older relationships, and myself. Brandon and I sat down and dissected every corner of our lives growing up together and realized how cyclic it was.”
Read More“After high school, I began taking video seriously. I started obsessing over cine cameras and their technology. I couldn’t think about anything other than color, how cameras work, why a shot looks good, etc. Now I’m just constantly creating more projects and learning as I go.”
Read More“The biggest challenge of making the film was staying away from being too preachy and convoluting the narrative. Considering it was the first piece of a screenplay I had ever written, naturally I wanted to talk about everything that I had an opinion about.”
Read More“In reflection, it all stemmed from a fascination in people and a desire pouring out of us to share their stories alongside a learned ability to chameleon ourselves through feeling. Acting was just the first vessel.”
Read More“I somehow talked my dad and stepmom into taking my younger brother and I to see Pulp Fiction. Our jaws dropped for different reasons. I was transfixed. Something sparked. They were mortified and probably expected child services to arrest them right there.”
Read More“I also just loved the strange aesthetic of those little cheap-looking hotel rooms that they set up for the sleep studies, often hidden somewhere on a sad hospital floor or in a bland office building. Once I began writing, I also started to realize it was a film about loneliness, existential fear, and human connection.”
Read More“The worst actual rock bottom day of my fucking life- which did not in fact happen in a beautiful mansion, but in a sketchy glass shop in the wholesale district. It had kind of voluntarily bled out of my memory by the time Kelly came to me with a rough draft of the script.”
Read More“While living together, we developed a bit of constantly and aggressively singing our own praises, while lamenting over how, in our first year of post-grad life, we weren’t yet famous. I wanted to make an absurd series about two weirdos who had incredibly inflated senses of self with no visible drive and no visible skills.”
Read More“The thing I’m always resisting with animation is how planned it is and how polished and overworked it can start to look, I like to leave room for intuitive or last minute changes. I think that’s what I enjoy most about working on Get Up, Pierrot, it’s imperfect, dirty even. I don’t bother tracing previous frames, if I make a mistake it still ends up in the final, it’s not precious.”
Read More“I grew up in Tennessee and spent most of my time outside as a kid. In middle school, one of my buddies got a camcorder for Christmas and we just starting filming weird scenes in the woods and putting them on YouTube. You can maybe still find some of them. Ever since, it's been an obsession for sure.”
Read More“I remember being in my room, putting the pictures in the editing program and just editing the way I felt it. There were no rules, no theoretical frameworks, no filmschool, no producer, just doing it the way it felt right.”
Read More“We had to put the kids in the zone—I’d have rehearsals, but not of the scene, just of them all being together. They weren’t an actual class, so we had to build a dynamic between them so they felt like a class. The kids contributed a lot of their own ideas, they really added to the film.”
Read More“When the neighbours downstairs were having sex the whole house would echo and rattle. We didn't even know their last names, but we knew every intimate detail of what they got up to. It was ridiculous. Anyway, that place was in the back of my mind when I started writing Party Wall a few years later in 2017.”
Read More“There were a lot of challenges, particularly because we had no money and everyone was donating their time and services. I had a great cast, but most of whom were untrained child actors, which meant short shooting days. Then of course bugs, driving scenes, shooting on film, animals.”
Read More“The production was smooth and lovely, or so my dubious memory claims. Nice people in a kind place. I love shooting in the middle of nowhere. Plenty of space to park the pickups and no one wanders into the damn shot.”
Read More“I worked as a first assistant director (which is my current "day job") on a feature film where the sex scene was handled uncomfortably by the director. It wasn't the same situation as what's seen in Rehearsal but it was similar in that it fell in that grey area of consent where it was hard to point at the specific incident that made the experience uneasy.”
Read More“I didn't really know what would happen once James's character got into the house. Eventually the story became about the stilted way adult men make friends and react to each other's emotions. These guys are really trying to connect but they're totally ill-equipped to do so.”
Read More“I grew up in Pittsburgh, and I think that the two movies central to my early life there were the 1973 animated version of Charlotte's Web with Debbie Reynolds, and Space Jam. When I was five or six, I loved Space Jam so much that I washed my VHS copy with soap and water and inadvertently destroyed it.”
Read MoreThe gloriously absurd, “A Very JNCOS Movie,” directed by Zoe Katz, finds a group of young men wearing gigantic JNCOS trying to stay safe on a construction site. We asked Katz how the project started, what the biggest challenge was, and what comes next for her…
Read MorePart proof-of-concept, part exploratory film poem about the war on drugs and the rigged American dream, “Pharmacopeia” follows a pharmacist trying to pay off her student loans by dealing weed. We asked director/star Tania Taiwo how the project started, what the biggest challenge, and what comes next for her…
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