5 Questions with Alex Kavutskiy
The brilliant cringe-comedy by director Alex Kavutskiy, “Squirrel,” concerns the aftermath of an unfortunate incident where two L.A. strangers are forced to reconcile with a new reality and one another. We asked Kavutskiy where the idea came from, his writing process, and going too far…
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I had very lovely parents growing up, who signed me up for anything possible -- chess, piano, soccer, karate, etc. And I didn't like anything and stubbornly quit everything. But I liked the family video camera. We have plenty of home videos of my dad trying to film a family birthday or something and there's toddler me yelling at the camera, telling him where to point it and telling other family members what to say. Eventually they did get me a video camera of my own and I loved using that and shooting little movies, usually starring my younger brother, and I can currently and proudly say that there's at least one thing in this world I didn't quit (yet).
In my teens, I saw "The Graduate" for the first time and then soon after happened to catch "Hannah and Her Sisters" on TV and I was like "wait, are movies good?" Movies were already my favorite thing but I never stopped to think about them and, sounds dumb in retrospect, but I just realized movies are really good. So I hijacked the family Netflix account (which was by mail then) and took a deep dive into film. And then while this was happening, "Stella" came on Comedy Central in 2005, which at the time, and now, that's the funniest thing I've ever seen. And from that, I came across their earlier Stella shorts and then everything I made the rest my teens was just wannabe Stella shorts.
And as I was realizing I wanted to go into filmmaking as a career, I started submitting to Channel101 -- which I had known about only from The Lonely Island webseries The 'Bu. For the uninitiated, Channel 101 is a monthly film festival downtown that screens ten mini-tv shows and the audience votes on which ones return and which ones are canceled. So with the hard deadlines and a live audience, that was basically my film school. And I really found a home of people who liked what I was about and I liked what they were about and I met not only most of my closest friends there but most of my favorite creative collaborators. And while I still stay involved with Channel 101, it's led me to "bigger" things like festival shorts, TV stuff, a micro-budget feature, and back to festival shorts so here I am, doing this interview.
2) How did this project start - what was the earliest element that came to you, and how did you go about building from that?
This short came after an extremely traumatic experience in my life. And it's kinda funny because I really remember my mindset of wanting to shoot something really light and funny that'll just take my mind of my personal drama. And now watching it a year later (and I can't speak for anything else watching it) but I do feel a lot of the weight of my pain at the time in this. So while I didn't consciously start with "I am hurt, I am now making movie about my hurt", I think that's subconsciously what it was. Also, I was in a car accident a few months prior to writing this (but unlike this, fortunately nobody was hurt) and I completely didn't even think about that until someone mentioned my accident after I showed them a cut of it. So I think I'm learning how out of tune I am with my subconscious.
But consciously, as most of my projects thus far, I started thinking about the story with casting in mind first. I wanted to write a short for Max and Andrea. Andrea, I was obviously a huge fan of ever since I saw her in Stella. I did an Adult Swim special called "Cool Dad" and she was my first choice to reach out to for playing opposite Jerry O'Connell and it was just a frigging dream come true working with her and I just couldn't wait to do it again. Max, I first saw in Bev (also a NoBudge short), which was playing at the same festival as my feature was. I immediately befriended Bev directors Alex and Samy (who you can spot as terrific background talent in Squirrel) and suddenly Max was in my friend circle and I desperately needed in my gut to write something for him. So I just lived my life always keeping Max and Andrea's faces in my head and trying to think of a simple way to get them in a room together and be as intimate as possible. One day, I was talking with Max about god-knows-what and the premise just shot into my brain. Max was living in New York at the time but was going to visit LA for pilot season so, in the spirit of "first idea, best idea", I saw my window and just ran with it. The Rat Race stuff was actually a placeholder in the script but I never thought of anything I liked better.
3) I’d love to hear a bit about your writing process, particularly your sense of knowing how far to take this. Did it come together quickly, or did you have epiphanies at some point that you wanted to take it further - like the bathroom scene for instance. Is there a world where you considered taking it even further?
Writing's tough. This short, I had some of the easiest times I've ever had writing and some of the hardest. The opening scene was incredibly easy to write -- and it was a blast to shoot and it was the easiest to edit. And I was so happy with it and the rest of the writing and filmmaking process was trying to live up to how much I liked the opening scene and I'm still not fully sure how well I stuck the landing. Which I think is really common for all filmmakers. The metaphor I liked to use is math. For whatever reason, some kids in school are just naturally good at math. And I was one of those kids. I never got why anyone else was having any trouble with it even, you just look at what it says in the texbook and swap out some stupid-ass numbers. And then when I got to college, I decided to get a minor in math -- because why not, I'm good at it. And then life hit me with calculus and I realized real fast, oh I'm not good at math at all. When it came to putting effort into really understanding math, that was just a hard pass for me. So I think if someone has any aptitude or interest toward filmmaking, they at the very least are pretty good at arithmetic -- which in filmmaking is the first act, it's the setting up the characters and the fun premise. But the middle and the ending is where the real work is, it's the matrix theory linear algebra or whatever the fuck class I nearly failed.
In terms of going further, yeah for sure I considered a lot of stuff. One of the drafts had a sex scene and I can't even remember other stuff I toyed with. I've been called a "dark" filmmaker a lot and whenever I'm asked at a party what genre of movies I make, unless I've had too much to drink and really in the mood to argue how genres don't exist, I do answer "dark comedy". A lot of writing is throwing things at a wall and seeing what gets you excited I definitely tend to gravitate toward more extreme things. And I think that's generally because it feels more... and I'll use this word carefully... authentic. But I don't necessarily mean like "this shit's real right here" but more like movies and storytelling is so burnt into all of our brains, that it's such a bummer and feels so false to get ahead of a story in any way or being able to see the filmmaker pulling back. So two of my favorite movies ever are "Greenberg" and "Good Time" and, if I was forced to put them in camps, I'd put "Greenberg" in the more realistic camp and Good Time in the less so camp. But they both go to incredibly earned extremes, whether it's pouring an obscene amount of acid into a knocked out security guard's mouth or Ben Stiller going down on Greta Gerwig after a couple sips of a Corona. And I think to make something compelling and moving, it's crucial to set a tone where you genuinely believe anything can happen and anybody could get hurt (which could mean physically or emotionally and always fun when it's both) and "going there" is a great way to set that up. But at the same time, going dark or extreme just for the shock value also reads incredibly inauthentic. Finding that balance is hard and the way my brain tends to work is thinking of extremes first and then scaling it back. When it comes to the darker stuff I think of, it's always a question of is this good and earned or is this a crutch and a distraction from the story. The short I'm currently editing was written with a huge extreme in the middle and I'm toying with a cut right now that fully takes it out and it's kinda liberating in a certain way to show restraint and not go that far. This was a very long way of saying yes I considered going further but decided that her injury in the car accident was so horrific that the most effective story would hold that as the most "extreme" thing.
But figuring out that story took a minute. Storytelling is more or less asking a question in the beginning and answering it by the end and the reason I think I had such a hard time writing is due to the tough nature of questions raised. I didn't start from a place any deeper than "she got paralyzed from a car accident because he was texting something very mundane and unimportant while driving" but after looking at the first scene, it sets up some difficult questions, which basically boil down to "how do you find meaning in a meaningless world?", which isn't the easiest question to tackle whether you're a philosopher living in Ancient Greece or Alex Kavutskiy living across the street from a 7/11. So all I could do is bounce ideas off myself and see if could possibly buy them. In my personal situation, I never got an explanation or apology and was really struggling with figuring out how to get closure, so that was my only compass. Would I buy that she just forgives him by the end and moves on? No, too cheesy. Would I buy that he gets some sort of comeuppance? No, too revenge fantasy. Would I buy that she'll never get closure but very slowly just move on from things? Sure. So then the answer to "how do you find meaning in a meaningless world?" isn't "by doing xyz" but just "you can't, but time makes it a less pressing question". Which isn't a particularly easy thing to cinematically show but it led the writing to not focus on her accepting the rest of her life in a wheelchair but on letting go with her interest with his text messages, Rat Race, and ultimately him. And as someone who always oscillates between viewing the world with a humanist lens or a nihilistic lens, I think I landed on an ending that works for me -- she's able to enjoy a funny movie outside of the context of the pain that movie brought her so maybe she'll be fine but also she's never going to walk again and is watching fucking Rat Race. Which is a movie I love, for the record.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
Scrolling through my Letterboxd, what really jumps out is "The Green Ray" by Eric Rohmer. I've seen it before and was really hankering for a rewatch and it didn't let me down. Going back to talking about going further, Rohmer is probably the king of showing that you don't need extremes. You can just have a premise of a woman lonely on vacation and it breaks your heart. It's gorgeous, the performances are great, nothing really happens and you can't look away. I don't really know what to say about it. The other movies that jumped out while scrolling were my rewatches of "Down by Law” and "The Heartbreak Kid" and, combining these three with the new Tarantino movie which I loved, I think what really excites me is a movie that really tosses the three act structure out the window. I actually really love screenwriting advice and books and they're like heroin to me and I think it's incredibly valuable to know but goddamn does something get my gears going, something that's compelling start to finish and doesn't have that traditional structure. Hard to nail!
5) What’s next for you?
Right after I shot Squirrel, I shot another short, wanting to make the exact opposite of Squirrel. Instead of a clear premise, just a slice of life. Instead of static shots, moving shots and zooms. Instead of bright and flat, dark and moody. I'm still finishing it up but really excited about it. I think it's always fun to jump to something completely different. Also pitching some TV stuff and writing a feature like everyone else in Los Angeles. I never would've guessed that Squirrel was going to be as well received as it was and receive such festival attention so I'm hoping to not blow that momentum of having a few people slightly interested in me as a filmmaker now.
Contact Info:
Website: http://www.alexkavutskiy.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kavutskiy
Twitter: twitter: @kavut
IG: @kavutskiy