5 Questions with Jamie McIntosh and Harry Cepka
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
J: I was a performative kid who grew up doing drama in prep school and high school back in Jamaica. During my college years in New York, I started and left several acting programs, realizing they didn’t work for me. I gradually figured out that the only way for me to break into film acting was to make my own work. So here we are!
H: When I was little, my dad would show me obscure Czech movies and, although I didn’t necessarily like or understand them at the time, they must have had an effect on me. One day, he showed me The Idiots, a Danish Dogme 95 film shot on a camcorder, and said “see, you can make a movie” - and I think that has haunted me ever since.
2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?
J: After a brief stint in L.A., I luckily moved back to the city a few weeks before the lockdown began. I had no furniture, I was totally alone and I had nothing to do. “wormgirl” came out of my diminished existence: I felt like a worm, inching from one random solitary activity to the next. I eventually wrote up my experience as a short film and showed it to Harry. We kept trying to figure out a beginning and an end to make it feel complete, but we slowly realized the whole point was that there was no end. So we expanded the idea into a series of vignettes that don’t really begin or end - just like days under lockdown!
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?
J + H: The biggest challenge was listening to ourselves. if something didn’t work, we had to trust ourselves enough to call it and try something else. We also kept trying to add structure, so we shot a number of plot-driven scenes, but they always felt wrong. Learning to trust our gut was the key to finding our voice, so when we followed our instincts it worked out; if we were smiling when we watched playback, we knew it was good.
The easiest part was that we made something out of almost nothing. We had no budget or crew or time constraints. So once we figured out the truth of the scene, we didn’t have to rely on anything outside of an actor and a camera. You can have more fun this way.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
J+H: We both love Southeast Asian films and most recently enjoyed Zia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart and Tsai Ming-Liang’s Rebels of the Neon God. Each film has so much style and character, and isn’t afraid of finding its own pace and narrative direction. We also just watched “Cocktail” and were amazed at how Tom Cruise can carry a storyless movie with nothing but pure charisma. In fact, we suspect that Tom Cruise and wormgirl are the same person…
5) What’s next for you?
H: My first feature film, “Raf,” is currently going through the virtual festival circuit, and I’m working on a new feature script with Jamie. We hope to have something ready to shoot, with a similarly low-budget angle, when things open up again!
J: I’m trying to make more work under whatever limitations the world is imposing on us. It’s a long game and you just have to strap in for the ride :)
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IG @jjamiemcintoshh
IG: @harry_cep