Q&A with Robbie Barnett

The future is neon and holographic, and there’s a hallucinogenic drug that turns anxiety into well-being, as seen in the strange vision that is “Talk About Your Dreams,” the new film from director Robbie Barnett. We asked him how it came to be, the long process of completing the film, and shooting in 3D…

1) What was the original inspiration to make this film? And how did the idea evolve over time?

I wrote and shot this film in the Summer of 2015, and have been editing it until a day or two before this NoBudge premiere, so it's been an extremely long journey, which is kind of funny for a short film, but my opinion on it kept changing and evolving. 

A year after shooting an experimental horror feature film in 2014 (Tears of God), I felt kind of like a failure loser when it didn't get into all the big film festivals and nobody "got me." I was living depressed in hot North Carolina at the outset of a long-term important relationship and spending a lot of my time with friends in this small city Durham, skateboarding and drinking and philosophizing and trying to see every single Miyazaki film that came through in one of those yearly Ghibli fests at this cool little theater (shown in the movie at the part where she eats Chipotle all alone). We would hang out at a corny Italian wine bar with a patio all summer as if we were somewhere nicer, treating the southern city like it was old and European, and the whole thing felt so idyllic. The last Miyazaki film that played at the theater was Porco Rosso, which slowly destroyed me. What at first felt like a film so carefree and childish and a meandering, a fantasy of a nice life, slowly dissolved in my psyche into deep themes of identity loss, encroaching fascism, the world's lost innocence, the death of all your family and friends, and not being able to fully be with the one you love. I bought the DVD after seeing it for my then girlfriend and I think she was confounded by my barely contained tears during the "graveyard in the sky" section of the film (but maybe also due to my depression?). I loved that a film could have such unsentimental and honest lightness by respecting and admitting but not giving in to its own darkness - it felt triumphant that, despite the overwhelming undercurrents of sadness and loss, the characters found meaning in how they related to each other, through friendship or love. So one night, super inspired by my reaction to basically movies for children, I wrote Talk About Your Dreams in one sitting, and spent all of my money from a job where I was running a teleprompter for education modules to make my own live-action Miyazaki film in Durham.

After shooting this film and it, also, getting rejected from all the big festivals...and the small ones, I shelved it. Until I saw Call Me By Your Name, I had a belief that people only really care about movies that obsessed about conflict and plot, and that I was maybe a terrible filmmaker for not having a more serious, conclusive tone. So, when I saw the reaction to CMBYN in friends and the public, which to me looked like a desire for warm weather and celebration with others, I un-shelved it, edited it a little more, and luckily got to screen it at Maryland Film Festival and release it here on NoBudge.

When I wrote the film, I was inspired by the hikikomori (Japanese youth who never leave their apartments) and other anti-social Japanese cultural staples, most of which have weirdly become mainstream popular in the last four years. When I made this movie, private room karaoke, ramen, mukbang, virtual reality, and Alexa either didn't exist or were not popular outside the major US cities, and no one vaped. I was wondering what if a hikikomori had to face their greatest fears - death, and even worse, social interaction - and realized that life isn't so scary, and is actually worth the risk to spend it with other people, even ones who are sent to kill you. Now we live in a time where communication in all forms between people, including the "Other,"  needs to be immediately filtered through ideologies and possibly distrusted, and that everyone is a possible enemy whose evils have yet to be excavated. Only one part of the film seems to have come true, the anti-social part where people are self-isolating themselves from danger and anxiety, whereas the naive optimism of the second part has yet to be seen, where people decide to un-fuck themselves and desire honest interactions with each other with a respect that the other person is more complex than a sentence written on social media. Outsiders may think the declining birth rate and weird, depressing sexuality of Japan is funny, but just wait until the American remake, coming very very soon.

2) It was shot in 3D, yes? Was it ever shown that way? What do you think is the difference in experience watching in 2D vs 3D?

The film was shot by Michael Ormiston, who was really into 3-D images at this time after seeing the Godard film Goodbye to Language. I wanted to make it in VR, but there weren't approachable tools to live-action VR around then, so we agreed to shoot the film on a two camera, stereoscopic 3-D rig that Michael built himself. I wanted the audience to have a more vivid and tangible experience with the 'life' inside the film as we joined the protagonist on their journey outside of their apartment.

We have yet to show the film in 3-D, but would love any opportunity to do so! The 3-D cut is so insanely beautiful and almost shocking. The problem is, for a short film, it's hard to convince festivals/programmers to do all the work to show a 14 minute 3-D film. There's also this general aversion to 3-D, and I speculate that the distaste comes from the fact that most people making 3-D films aren't doing so in an artful way - they are doing it to add to spectacle (i.e. Marvel films) and factoring in the extra five dollars you pay over the normal 2-D movie price.

3) But yeah, either way, the visuals are amazing. Very unique and transformative. How was the working relationship between you and Michael. How planned out was everything — did you do storyboards, test shoots?

Thank you! Michael is one of my long-time best friends, so working with him is more like hanging out - every shoot builds up to finale where Michael gets drunk and someone forces him to smoke weed. Sometimes he gives in, sometimes he doesn't. We didn't sleep more than 4-5 hours a night on this film, but Michael was always awake an hour before me, fixing up and riding a moped I had just bought. We've shot so many things together that all I really do is write out a shot list and we discuss it on the day. Sometimes if he doesn't quite get when I'm going for I'll just input it directly into his code. 

4) Can you talk a bit about how your cast — Kate Lyn Sheil and Sophie Traub — how they came to the project, and what was the working process between you three?

I had just done Tears of God with Kate the year before (who I met through you, at the Sun Don't Shine premiere), and she was in North Carolina shooting a Marvel tv show and had downtime so she drove up to Durham and made the film with us. Working with Kate is always fun because she's so talented and we complain about the same things. Everyone was upset that I was gagging watching her doing the throwing up scene. Everyone was hassling me to also put the fake puke in my mouth but I couldn't. Later, after the shoot, I did the scene for the Vine for forgiveness. Sophie I was an immediate fan of after seeing her in Thou Wast Mild and Lovely so I just found her email and cold messaged her as one does, and luckily she responded! 

What else are you working on at the moment?

I just finished writing a feature film about celebrity imposters in L.A. that I think will be really fun and funny, so I'm trying to put that into production as soon as I can!

Contact Info:

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