5 Questions with Bill Risen
A poetic experimental film following a Baltimore musician after a painful breakup, “Wave Wave” uses a variety of formats to paint a authentically gritty portrait. We asked director Bill Risen how the project started, what the biggest challenge was, and what comes next for him…
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I got an early start in broadcast when I had an internship at The Discovery Channel when I was a teenager, and I have worked professionally in production and post production in various capacities ever since.
2) What’s the backstory here - what was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?
The realization of this film is entirely due to Megan’s willingness to share her real life truth. She and I had both been dealing with some of the same heavy relationship stuff, and our collaboration grew out of our conversations about the various ways we were coping with that.
As far as the setting, I really wanted to make something that showed how intense and beautiful the Baltimore art scene is, anyone who is in that world will tell you that creativity is pretty much like currency on North Avenue. I had been shooting 35mm portraits at various clubs there, and Megan is constantly churning out the amazing live performance shots that you see in the film, so this was a natural extension of that work.
We filmed over the course of about two years and the narrative developed organically out of what was really going on. The individual scenes themselves are dramatized, but there is nothing in this film that is not based on some combination of real life events. Whenever I would try to stage a scene that had some kind of moral agenda or betrayed the truth of the moment, it would feel contrived and would inevitably be cut out. Working in this manner convinced me that the only way to say something genuine and meaningful about life is by being fiercely honest and respectful of the medium.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the best, and the least?
I have attempted projects like this in the past where the lines between documentary and dramatization become thin, and the hardest but most rewarding part is balancing the relationships with the people in front of the camera while trying to get what is required to make a cohesive narrative that people can understand so it won’t just feel like slices of life. I spent a lot of time editing the collage sequences and composing the score on top of Megan’s guitar tracks, and from the early reactions that I have gotten it seems that people are really feeling those in the way they were intended, and those reactions alone make the project a success in my book.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
There is a little independent theater in D.C. called Suns Cinema that is inside a townhouse, and a few months ago they screened High Art with Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchell. That movie really gets at the allure and the consequences of substance abuse in a way that I haven’t seen anywhere else except for maybe Requiem For a Dream. I love how the Sheedy character approaches photography as kind of being secondary to the life that she was living when she actually took the photos, kind of like a dramatization of a Nan Goldin series.
5) What’s next for you?
The title of this film, Wave Wave, comes from the naming of music genres like New Wave and Vaporwave etc, but it is also the second film in a series I am doing about Baltimore. The first one was a feature called Jump Jump, which was about violence intervention, so I may do a third one to complete the trilogy.
Contact Info:
Website: http://billrisen.com
Instagram: @tangentsofbill