5 Questions with Andy Rayner
“Unwholly Moments,” by director Andy Rayner, is an unflinching character study about an aspiring actor experiencing a lack of meaningful human connection. We asked Raynor about the projects’s origin, structuring the film without a central narrative, and how he approached its sex scenes…
1) Can you talk a bit about your background and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I don’t have any formal education in film at all. I always loved movies as a kid, I felt like I learned more in movies than I did in school. I used to steal my parents’ handycam and film stuff with friends, the usual stuff. I got really into horror before becoming kind of obsessed with 90’s indie dramas as a teenager. Movies like The Low Life with Rory Cochrane and Johns with David Arquette. Somehow that led me into people like David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Linklater and Charlie Kaufman. I remember watching Waking Life at 17 and really realizing that film was kind of a limitless medium. I ended up dropping out of high school and working to buy a camera and I just kind off started doing everything from there. I made music videos, short films, freelanced on the absolute worst gigs, became an editor, worked in adult films because the pay was decent and I got paid to learn. I didn’t wanna get stuck there. I was 26 and making films and music became therapeutic but I hadn’t done anything legitimate and I felt a clock ticking. So I took what little money I saved and made my first feature. I kind of just hustled my way into everything without really knowing anything, but I enjoy learning.
2) What about this project? How did it began, and how did it get rolling?
Robin and I worked on my first feature “Idled” together for 5 years. He’d originally come on as an actor and then helped me with rewrites/re-shoots and helped me complete what I thought was a failed endeavor. After completing the final round of re-shoots, he had an odd encounter that sparked the idea for Unwholly Moments. He had just moved into a new apartment after living out of his car for 6 months. He’d saved all of his money for a while and pulled together eleven grand for a film budget. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to make, he just knew he wanted to make SOMETHING. He contacted me with a very obscure idea that very quickly snowballed into a feature. I was honestly amazed that he even wanted to work with me again since the first film was still in post. The idea was very personal and came from a very real place of vulnerability and I was so pained and in love with the idea that I absolutely had to do it, because it also fell in-line perfectly with a type of film that I was dying to make. From there things got rolling and we wanted to get to shooting right away. We wrote the film in September of 2016 and shot it that December.
3) I found your film quite disturbing in a lot ways, and I felt this burden and heaviness from watching it. I felt your lead character’s plight and pain very vividly. And it begins in the first scene. The shift in mood around 6 or 7 minutes really fucked me up. It captures this thing of being trapped in your own head, this internal craziness that you can’t escape from. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a movie where I got that feeling so intensely. How did you make this happen? It required such a commitment of a build up, and then an equal commitment to stay in the moment afterward. How would you describe what you were trying to achieve in that scene?
Well first, I'm so sorry and secondly thank you, that's awesome! Most scenes of the movie is based on actual moments in Robin’s life. We really wanted to take these small moments of insecurity in situations that would probably never come up in conversation with anyone else; and amplify it so that the audience could feel that kind of slow burn of anxiety induced awkwardness. We had gone over the story of what happened with this girl: how she came to a dinner date with a platonic brain and how it forced Robin’s character into having to backpedal his romantic intentions. We dissected reasoning and behaviors with Katarina, trying to break down the real person from Robin’s point of view and she clicked with that situation almost TOO perfectly. We wanted to show two people who’s intentions were worlds apart in an intimate setting and watch it like an awkwardly hilarious car crash in slow motion. At that 6-7 minute mark that you’re talking about, there’s a moment when the camera even backs up awkwardly wanting to leave the situation.
4) That scene and many others throughout I would consider brutal in one way or the other. I’m wondering about your process, and how you build your scenes. First of all, how written is this vs improvised? Secondly, how did you structure your narrative? To me, it feels like these extended vignettes. There’s not a traditional central narrative. How did you piece it together, and how do you think about something like, keeping your viewers interest? Is that something you account for, or care about?
Building the characters was one of the funnest parts about the process. My childhood was kind of hectic and had a pretty large rotation of some pretty dramatic people doing crazy things, so I had to develop a sort of survival instinct of reading people and their intentions to try to get ahead of whatever drama was coming. This was the first time I really got to use it in a really constructive way and explore it in a film. We first intended to write a full screenplay but quickly realized how contrived everything was coming across, so we instead wrote a 14 page outline and improvised all the dialogue except for the sides Robin reads in his auditions. We relied heavily on the actor’s abilities to embody their characters to push the narrative of each scene. That all really began with casting. When we held auditions, we didn’t have anyone read sides. We just had them have conversations with Robin and did sort of a Q&A with everyone while I gauged their personalities. Everyone was cast based on their ability to handle jumping into semi-existential conversation and how genuine they were in their answers.
Unwholly Moments was about a collection of seemingly mundane moments where the harshest self-realizations were coming to light. All of the “in-betweens” that no one talks about. We half-intentionally attempted to make a pseudo-sociological study on casual neuroticism and not clicking with the right people, the right way. The main thing we cared about doing was having the characters actions and reactions be the narrative as opposed to having a fully fleshed story because reality isn’t as neat as a standard narrative and reality also doesn’t always feel like reality. We didn’t want to concern ourselves with the viewer’s interest or attention spans until we had a rough cut of the film. With it being improvised awkwardness there were really long takes that really forced the actors to live in the awkwardness and it resulted in a 3 hour cut. Once we had that, we had to figure out the right pacing for the vignettes that showed enough ups and downs and progressions or regressions within the lead character. We went through several “picture locks” before settling on this one because, like life, there were so many fucking lulls and we finally cut them all out. It wasn’t too difficult to structure the narrative itself because there were lots of scenes of repetition and daily headspaces, so it was just figuring out where to place what in terms of the characters habits and whether we can see him subtly growing or not. Some scenes just kind of followed one another naturally and totally by accident. The little accidental synchronicities we found in the footage really did their jobs in helping us put it all together.
5) Can you talk a bit about how you approached the sex scenes, and how/why you made the decision to present them in a fairly explicit manner?
Sex scenes are kind of a big deal and have to be dealt with delicately and empathetically. I think the thing that allowed us to do them how we did is that all of the actors liked that there were scenes going on during the sex. They were never intended to be sexy or provoking or glamorous. It was very much grounded in the reality that sex with the right people can be beautiful and how sex with strangers in contrived situations just isn’t cute. It’s graphic and unflattering and awkward. Every one of those scenes is told from the inside of both people’s heads. I wanted to have the intro scenes too for the female characters that gave subtle context to their headspace before going into the situation. When we interact with people we very rarely, if ever, think about what they were doing or going through prior to the interaction and that’s something that can make for completely missed connections. Being naked in front of someone puts you in a very vulnerable place so we wanted to show the dichotomy between physical vulnerability and emotional unavailability. We wanted to show how often sex is mistaken for intimacy and the kind of lengths some people will go trying to experience intimacy without really having a full understanding of what it is. Sex scenes are usually provocative cutaways or transitional scenes. These were an experiment in showing what’s going on with people in a sort of an act of “forced intimacy” and we really had to let the audience live in those uncomfortable moments.
Bonus Question: What’s a movie you’ve seen recently, new or old, that really resonated with you? And why?
I recently watched Paddleton and I couldn’t shake it for a couple of days. It really brought all my fears surrounding death to the surface. It was done very well and I had never seen suicide presented in such a beautiful way and I think it was really important. It was nice to see something that had meaning.
Bonus Question #2: What comes next for you? New projects on the horizon?
I’m working with Jellyhead Collective a lot at the moment, doing podcasts, short films, live music sessions and live events for charity. Robin and I have both a short and a feature in the works at the moment and hope to shoot one if not get started both by the end of the year. We’re sooo beyond ready to do the next thing that it can’t happen soon enough.
Contact Info:
Email: andyrayner.editor@gmail.com
IG: @jellyheadcollective.