1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?

When I was a young kid I wanted to be a video game designer. I went to different video game conventions and made these 10-20 minute montages about my experience. Sometime before high school started I saw Indie Game: The Movie and got to meet the filmmakers, Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky. That’s really when the shift happened. I don’t think I had ever met a filmmaker before, I had definitely never met an independent filmmaker before.

2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?

I saw a really interesting pile of trash in June of 2018. There was a framed photo of a woman, a couple of empty picture frames, mixed CDs and a lot of dead plants. I was already putting together a document of different visual, thematic, and story ideas that I was interested in using for this film I was making in Prague but the pile of trash really gave me a story. On the plane there I wrote a first draft. The script stayed the same in a lot of ways but was really fleshed out over the next 3 months by my class and the wonderful screenwriting professor, Eva Papouskova.

3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?!

The biggest challenge was working on 35mm. I think we only had something like 27 minutes worth of footage, which meant everything needed to be done in one take, two takes maximum. We spent a very long time practicing the shot that spins around the room and could only shoot one take. 

Despite the difficulty of working with film, working with cinematographer, Cece Chan, made the process easy. When we sat down to talk about the script for the first time we saw basically the same thing with every shot. When we didn’t meet eye to eye usually her ideas were better than mine.

 4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?

Maysles Cinema put together this really incredible online program of anti-imperialist documentaries called After Civilization. The 12 films really blur the line of what documentary is and what it can be. Each film took me to a part of the world I’ve never seen before (Tuvalu, Fordlandia, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico...) The last film in the collection, Slow Action (2010) Dir. Ben Rivers, really struck a chord with me. It imagines four utopian societies in a post-apocalyptic world. The ideas of utopia are really disparate and startling and the 16mm photography is just stunning. I also saw Set it Up (2018) Dir. Claire Scanlon on Netflix the other day and wow, that’s a funny movie.  

5) What’s next for you?

In quarantine some friends and I put together this online festival called the Long Distance Film Festival and we’ve just started preparing for the second one. I’m almost done editing my next film, about a man who photoshops pictures of his brother’s fiancée giving birth to him. It stars Anthony Oberbeck and a couple other NoBudge alumni. There should be a trailer for that soon. I’m also posting pictures of my cat on Instagram.

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