5 Questions with Claire Siebers & Emma Horwitz
Claire Siebers (left), Emma Horwitz (right)
In “Genius in a Small Town,“ a young couple hires a hunky arborist to inspect a tree on their property and get more than they bargained for. We asked co-directors Claire Siebers and Emma Horwitz where the idea came from, their writing process together, and celebrity arborists…
1) Can you talk about the origins of the project?
We typically alternate ideas on projects, so the last piece we made, a web series called “Power Lunch,” was Claire's brainchild and this one was Emma's. We originally planned to base this film on a few characters from a novella Emma had written about the Hudson Valley, but as we worked together a new character named Bert Howard began to emerge. We found his ridiculous id irresistible, and we started weaving a new story with the problems he raised. We became excited to explore how men are intimate with each other, what their desires are for each other’s bodies, and the line between the erotic and the quotidian. What are non-athletic ways men jostle around each other? We were, as always, interested in pressing as a gesture, which is an obsession of ours.
2) What is your writing process together? Do you write in the same room, for instance, or trade drafts? Was there stuff that got stripped away, or added or last minute?
Our writing process together looks a lot like not-writing. It consists of a lot of confessional, tangential conversation and eating. We like to watch clips of artists we admire, movies one of us hasn’t seen yet (we recently watched “Teeth” while working on another script), and other internet-based nonsense. We write really well with a deadline and have basically learned to trust that even if we're three days into a four-day writing retreat with nothing to show but a surrounding mess of apple cores, beer bottles, and pizza crusts, we'll miraculously start and finish our draft on that fourth day. This film was more improvisational than our other work, especially given that we knew the actors, and their interests.
3) I’m always good for a comedy about jealousy, but throw in a “celebrity arborist” and I’m golden. Can you talk a bit about the story and character development?
We love trees, and became especially enthralled by the amazing genre of tree-cutting/arborist videos on YouTube — we were both living in Brooklyn at the time, and the videos seemed like an incredible reminder that while many friends and loved ones vacate the city on a yearly basis to greener pastures, the reality of managing the fragility of the human body around the incredible force and momentum of nature is an especially ironic inevitability — felling a tree is no delicate business, and engaging in such activity is not so much an effort in becoming more natural, but asserting one’s self over nature. What is the privileged white person’s ability to have any healthy perspective on land and its uses in this country? We were also curious about the ways that being "rugged" has been commodified and romanticized. Even when we do leave the city, we all have social media and are keeping tabs on each other’s activities, so it's easy for a choice that is articulated as a kind of purity to become purely performative. We wanted to try and make a piece about a guy who seems to embody a kind of Emersonian authenticity who turns out to be just as fake as Thoreau, sneaking into his mother’s house to drop off his laundry for her to wash while he takes a leisurely snow-shoe around a nearby pond.
4) What about your cast? What was your casting process like? And were there rehearsals or improvisation? Where there discussions about how over-the-top you wanted your arborist to be? It could have been more subtle, but I’m glad you went that far with him.
We generally write for specific actors. We figured out who would be in it pretty early on, and then tailored the piece around their skills and idiosyncrasies. We had one read before shooting, worked on the script, and invited the actors in about a week before we went on site. A few weeks later, we took Quincy Dunn-Baker to a nearby park and shot the Bert videos, which were a combination of scripted and improvisatory work. Quincy had been very protective of Bert up until that point and did not, in fact, want to go as far with him as we did (we cut a lot of incredibly weird stuff from the script for his sake). He was ultimately a very good sport and rode that tree trunk like a bucking bronco, for which we are forever grateful.
5) What’s next for you both?
Before we make a feature, we're filming one more short in the spring, called “Conference,” which is a satire of academia. Emma is currently pursuing an MFA in Playwriting at Brown, and Claire is about to perform in a play in New York City called NYLON by Sofia Alvarez and starring Sheila Vand.
Contact Info
Claire Siebers | Instagram: @csiebs
Emma Horwitz | Twitter: @e_horwitz