5 Questions with Josh Granovsky
The low-key exposé on selfie photoshopping, “wyd?” shows us the process of one man going to great lengths to alter his appearance just to respond to a text message. We asked director Josh Granovsky what his inspiration was, how the project evolved, and his stance on photoshopping…
1) Can you talk a bit about the genesis of the project?
The idea for this project came about when I was reading Like Brothers, a memoir by brother-filmmaker duo Mark and Jay Duplass. They laid out some really good advice on how to jumpstart your career by making a ton of short films based around whatever you have access to, which stuck with me because it was the first time I’d seen filmmaking presented as something accessible that I wouldn’t have to wait until I had more money or IMDB credits to do.
Towards the middle of December last year, I saw a post from a film festival in Kingston, Canada—where I go to school—asking for short films and its deadline was a week away. I’d never made a short film before but it seemed like a great opportunity and I’ve always found deadlines to be solid creative motivators. I finished up my exams, went home to Toronto and tried to workshop an idea based around being something I could film on my laptop, in my bedroom and totally alone. I remembered a time in the seventh grade where I tried to Photoshop John Cena’s abs onto my 11 year old body for a picture I wanted to send to a girl, so that became my starting point and the rest grew from there. I wrote the script at a coffee shop one morning, filmed the whole thing that night and sent out the final version to the festival the next day. And now we’re here and I’m super grateful for the response it’s gotten!
2) I love the real-time aspect of it — you really get to see the process unfold. Was this conceived this way from the beginning? Were there timing issues that you dealt with keeping things interesting while work was being done?
My plan was to film the short on my computer’s Photo Booth app for an hour and edit it down to the most interesting five minutes. I definitely wanted to communicate how much time the Photoshop process takes so anyone who watches it can understand the exhaustive nature of self-filtering, which is where the real-time stuff plays into it. I wrote up a bunch of possible distractions my character could get tangled up with to take some pressure off that main message, which led to me legitimately falling down a wormhole of dancing Tom Holland videos while filming.
3) What is your stance on photoshopping to alter appearance? Is it an acceptable practice in the modern world? To what degree?
I think it’s become very normalized to edit photos of yourselves to an acceptable and often recognizable degree, especially since you can do so in under ten seconds with Instagram filters. I think photoshopping can be really fun and a cool way to express yourself artistically, but where the whole thing runs into trouble for me is using it to create unrealistic body expectations. If I had to take a guess, I’d say the world would probably be a better place without that kind of photoshopping.
I didn’t start growing until the end of high school, which messed with my confidence for a while since I was comparing myself to the tallest kids in my grade and a ripped John Krasinski on the cover of Men’s Health—not much of a shock that I felt like I was coming up short there. It took a long time for me to shake the idea that my life wouldn’t be perfect until I was six feet tall and had eight-pack abs, and I feel lucky to be in a comfortable enough place now where I can kind of satirize that part of me. I’ve seen a great anti-airbrushing movement growing online which I think is really important, because aspiring to have a body or face you see on a billboard that’s been visually jacked up is an impossible task.
4) Speaking more generally now, what’s a movie you’ve seen recently, new or old, that really resonated with you, and in what way(s)?
The last movie I saw that I couldn’t stop thinking about was Ari Aster’s Hereditary. I think it’s a masterpiece, but wow, that movie messed me up for months. I don’t love feeling like I have no control over my life, so I think the scariest part of the movie for me was the possibility that nothing I do matters because my D.N.A. could’ve sentenced me to a miserable life from the start. It’s pretty horrifying, but I was also just psyched to feel such a strong reaction to a film like that. After the lights came on in theatre where I watched it, the woman sitting next to me turned and said, “You were really scared, huh?” She had been genuinely shrieking for the entire movie, so my facial expressions must’ve been pretty ghastly.
5) What else are you working on at the moment?
I’ve got one more year of my Film degree at Queen’s University, so I’m working on that now and will hopefully be done by the time I’m 21. I’ve had the privilege of being mentored by writer Lara Shapiro for the past little bit, who wrote for The Americans and is an American treasure. My ultimate aspiration is to work in TV, so I’ll probably try to write some more scripts over the summer. And mayyybe I’ll try to make another short film with more people than just myself, but please don’t hold me to that.
Contact Info:
Email: joshpgranovsky@gmail.com
Twitter: @JoshGranovsky.