5 Questions with Grant Conversano
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I’m a queer non-binary child of an alcoholic from Concord, North Carolina. A small southern town that is pretty conservative. My life at home was chaotic and traumatic with my parents, and at school, I tried to do whatever I could to fit in in order to not be bullied. I always felt “different” but I didn’t come to understand my queer nature until entering my twenties. Growing up, watching movies was a safe space for me to not only escape, but learn about a bigger world beyond the narrow one I was raised in. I never dreamed of becoming a filmmaker, I always thought movies were just made somewhere else. Then one day when I was 14 years old, at the local mall with my best friend Jordan Minor. He is still one of my closest friends and collaborators, he scored Alma. There were thousands of people in line at the food court that were applying to be extras in this “big movie”. Jordan pushed me to give it a shot, so I gave them my information. A month later I got a call to be an extra in that film which turned out to be The Hunger Games. I was on set for a week in Shelby, North Carolina for the scenes set in District 12. Through that experience, I began to see how films were constructed one shot at a time. The following summer the same casting director reached out and asked me to come be an extra in Homeland Season 2, which was shooting in Charlotte, North Carolina. I came to set and a few hours into the first day an AD pulled me out of the crowd to become the stand-in for Timothée Chalamet. I was 15 and he was 16, and this became my summer job. While my family was falling apart, my father diagnosed with Cancer, in and out of rehab and struggling to hold a job, I would drive myself to Charlotte and enter another world. I found a sense of family with that cast and crew I didn’t have at home. They told me about UNC School of the Arts and that became my path forward. Filmmaking saved my life and gave me a purpose at that age when things were pretty bleak.
2) What’s the backstory here - what was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?
I wanted to make a film about childhood that felt like a mix of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Lynn Ramsey’s Ratcatcher, and David Gordon Green’s George Washington. I wanted the film to be about a character who didn’t fit in, and was questioning everything around her. I was looking for a girl to play the lead instead of a boy because I wanted this film to express a lost feminine side of myself. A character who had a childhood that was similar to my upbringing, but at the same time different in ways I was not allowed to be. I also wanted to make a movie that was set in neighborhoods surrounding the school and work entirely with first-time actors. This led to a massive casting search for our lead actors and then we finally met the Rengifo family. They left Venezuela and had only been in the United States for a little over a year. Isabela, Sofia, and their mother Carolina were all very comfortable on screen. The rehearsal process was just spending time with them at their house and getting to know each other. Eventually, Isabela shared with us her novel that she was writing in Spanish on her phone in an app called watt-pad. I was fascinated by the idea of how this character, an outsider and an artist would use her smartphone to express an inner world that her peers on the school bus couldn’t see. Isabela’s writing was beautiful and expressed existential questions through a young adult genre story. So the process of writing this book, los hombre lobos, juxtaposed against her day to day life became the crux of the story.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the most and the least?
This film was incredibly difficult to make because there was never once a stable script or plan we were following, we just had to trust where it was taking us. The film was entirely in the process up until the very last sound mixing session where we were still rerecording voice-over and changing it. I am a huge fan of Robert Altman and Andrei Tarkovsky and I believe that cinema is more than just storytelling going from plot point A to to plot point B.. What makes cinema a unique art form is that we are communicating not with words, but with image and sound over time, to people in the future we will never meet. The very best filmmakers are always getting at a truth that is deeper than language, sometimes films affect you can’t put words to why.
The worst part of the process is when I feel like I’m out of touch with the impulse of what made me want to make the film in the first place, it’s a constant battle to stay in touch with the feeling that made me want to make the project in the first place, but when it comes together and people feel what I am trying to share with them, that is best part of filmmaking to me.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
Jean-Luc Godard’s most recent film The Image Book and the films he made in the Groupe Dziga-Vertov. These films are about taking apart the fantasy of the images we take to be true in our lives and deconstructing the illusion of character and story. In these films, Godard is trying to show us the ideology behind each image we consume and show the power of the camera to create false truths. This kind of work is really influencing what I’m making now.
5) What’s next for you?
I currently have a fellowship with the Indie Grits Lab in Columbia, South Carolina to make a film under the theme of REAL FICTION. At the moment the project is called On Becoming Undone, It’s a memoir in cinema. The form of the project is questioning the binary of documentary and fiction. I’m using childhood photos, present-day footage, and written scenes to make a film about my childhood with my alcoholic father and coming to terms with my identity as a Queer non-binary person. My brother and I are also starting a production company to house our collaborative work together. You can follow us here as we prepare to make our first feature film: https://applehousepictures.com https://www.instagram.com/applehousepictures/
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