5 Questions with Cole Borgstadt ("Voices of God")
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I was born & raised in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Fayetteville has a wonderful arts community, and I was lucky enough to grow up around some really creative people. I did theatre for a while growing up and then started messing around with iMovie HD. I took a film class in high school with Jonelle Lipscomb who was an actor and playwright. She was really story focused and was a big factor in me ever being interested in narrative filmmaking.
2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?
This project is loosely based on an event that occurred in high school when three boys were arrested for placing pipe bombs in people’s mailboxes. Luckily, no one was hurt that day, but our film plays out a world where someone was. This provided a really wonderful structure to explore the social pressures I experienced growing up in Arkansas around masculinity, vulnerability and spiritual questioning.
The initial idea came up in my last semester of college. From the beginning, we knew the project needed to be shot back in Arkansas and needed to be visually driven over dialogue driven. Within the context of the story, the narrative is built on this idea of silence in the face of vulnerability, so it was a really exciting building a visual language for the film knowing that it would be free of dialogue. This gave us a chance to experiment with how much of the story work could be done within each frame and each cut. The edit was pretty mapped out in advance so during production, it came down to understanding how each decision would be affecting an edit that was really dependent on rhythm.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?
Formally, the biggest challenge came with balancing the release of information to the viewer. In a script where character’s don’t talk, what and how are we presenting things for the viewer in their task of creating meaning. From the beginning, the goal was to make a film where the viewer is just dropped into scenes for a moment or two but then move on fairly quickly. There’s a risk in doing so that the viewer is just going to be completely lost or feel like the choices weren’t thoughtful. So navigating how much information you need to give the audience moment to moment and how much work you can leave them to do was tricky. It was always intended to be an experiential film first. I’m happy with the balance we struck.
On the production side, the day before our production, the weather forecast changed to thunderstorms for the final day. So the day before, we had to ultimately reschedule a four day shoot with twelve locations that was heavily reliant on the generosity of my community in Fayetteville. That was a stressful day where almost anything was fair game including rewrites and recasting. Luckily, we found a path and made it work. The community in Fayetteville was so hospitable and generous with their resources. This wouldn’t have been possible without them.
The easiest part was the culture on set. It was a real joy shooting this film. Everyone worked hard and worked humbly. We worked with a half local, half LA crew and everyone just meshed really well. Some of the best memories were just from sitting on my parent’s back porch having beers with everyone at the end of each day. Our DP, Jon Grace, had his 23rd birthday on set which was really special.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
Shohei Imamura’s Pigs and Battleships. I watched this for a movie club I’ve been doing with my friend, Noah Marger. It’s an incredible film about individual and cultural power struggle. The camera work is so kinetic and expressive. The final images of the film are really moving. It’s such a deeply textured world. It’s on Criterion Channel, everyone go watch!
5) What’s next for you?
Currently, Jon and I are in the finishing stages of a short documentary we co-shot/co-directed/co-edited about a band living out of an RV in the desert working on their first album. Patrick Perkins, our producer on Voices also produced this doc. Outside of that, we are just working on a variety of commercial projects just trying to save up money to shoot the next narrative project. I’m writing another short that would take place in Arkansas, this time with dialogue and actual scene-work.
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www.coleborgstadt.com | IG: @corgstadt