Q&A with Jesse Thurston

In “Space,” by Jesse Thurston, we’re thrown into the in-progress lives of three friends and an Airbnb guest in a Brooklyn apartment, each struggling to maintain relationships and well-being. We asked Thurston about the origins of the project, its layered structure, and deferred conversations…

1) Can you talk a little bit about your background, and how you first got interested in movies?

My formal training is in theatre as both an actor and director, and I spent a bunch of years doing improv and sketch in Chicago and New York. As a kid, I was always making movies with my friends and as an adult, making a movie still feels to me like an extension of playtime. I like that when you make a movie you create something that lasts, some artifact of your time spent working together with a group of people. I think certain movies have a special gleam because you can tell that the experience of making it really meant something to the people involved. 

2) This is a great follow-up to your previous short, “Snow Day.” Can you discuss how you went from that one to this one — what was the original idea and how long did it take to develop?

Both films started from a place of me trying to articulate an emotional experience I’d had but couldn’t define and “Space” is a kind of continuation, or deepening, or complication of what I was trying to understand with “Snow Day.” I like watching these films in relation to each other. 

Once it was finished, the script for “Space” sat on the shelf for about a year. It took awhile for me to have enough emotional distance from the events portrayed in the film to feel like I had some (any) objective understanding of what was going on. That’s the problem with directing your own writing, I guess— it’s hard to communicate an honest experience and also interpret it. Once I brought actors into the process, the script started to take on a life of its own, and we did a fair amount of re-writing in rehearsal and improvising on set. 
 
3) Like “Snow Day,” “Space” is notable for a really great cast. How do you go about building your cast of characters? Do you do auditions or screen tests? Is there any improvisation or ad-libbing going on?


I love assembling a cast that has balance in every direction: actors I’ve worked with before and those I haven’t; actors with more of a comedy background and those from the theatre world; actors that have existing relationships with each other and those that don’t, etc. We had some auditions, but I wound up working mostly with people I knew or had seen perform and wanted to bring in.

I had a clear sense of who these characters were before I cast the film, but there were details that changed once everyone was in the room together. Sections of the film were improvised, but always within a clear framework that had been rehearsed ahead of time; there was room to play, but like a jungle gym, not an open field. My goal on set is always to create an atmosphere where everyone feels safe to surprise themselves.

4) I think you have a very sophisticated sense of layering and structure with your films. Like the way in “Space” that you introduce your characters individually, and then gradually bring them all together. How much do you think about or strategize about structure? How much of this is the writing process, versus production, versus editing?

I think about structure a lot. I want to create story structures that allow the audience to have emotional discoveries simultaneously with the characters they’re watching. I think audiences get isolated when they can’t penetrate what’s happening, and also when they’re ahead of the story. I’m not interested in isolating my audience, I want to bring them along, so I’m curious to learn how little information I need to present for them to understand the specific situation of the film. That structure is laid out in the script and refined in the editing process. 

5) Though it’s pretty simple, it’s so thoughtfully and carefully built, and so much of it is about the things that go unsaid, or the deferred conversations. Like, these characters are existing in this moment before potentially life-changing, or at least relationship-changing, revelations could come out. I'm not sure what the question is, I guess, I'm just wondering if this is how you see the film, or was that a by-product of some other essential thing you were trying to communicate?

That’s absolutely how I see the film. I wanted to create a glimpse of a night that contains within it the seeds of future changes in these relationships. I like to imagine the characters looking back at this night six months, a year later, and wincing— like, why was I behaving like that! How could I have thought things were fine! I think ideally that tension between the present action and some imagined future is what makes the film fun to watch. We grow at the pace we grow, and it’s not easy to see the things you want to change about yourself or your relationships while you’re in the middle of it. I think movie-making has the potential to expand our capacity for compassion.

Bonus Question: What comes next for you?

I’ve spent the last year or so thinking mostly about process. Not just about what movies do I want to make, but about how do I want to make them. And about how the values of a collaborative, open process might ultimately be reflected in the final product. With those questions in mind, I’ve been developing a new, longer project through an in-depth rehearsal process with a small group of actors. I’ll be shooting that film in the fall. Keep you posted!

Contact Info:

Email: jerzzo@gmail.com

IG: @jessethurston

Twitter: @JTJesseJerzzo