5 Questions with Mitch deQuilettes & Chasen Bauer ("Staff Pick")
Mitch deQuilettes
1) What have you been up to since we last spoke about "Everything's Cancelled" last year?
Mitch deQuilettes (Director): When was that, September? Wow, feels like Pham and I just released that.
Since then, I've been developing a show. That’s all I can say about it right now unfortunately. I just don't want to mess with the juju. I also released a couple of music videos. Luckily, I’ve been very productive. Not with money jobs, but with overall creative output in general.
2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?
Chasen Bauer (Writer): We wanted to make something together. I brought Mitch a couple short stories I had written a while back. One of them is about a man in multiple realities that keeps chasing down his audience to convince them he’s real and trustworthy. Mitch was into it but wanted to move in a direction that allowed us to satirize the independent film world and toxic masculinity. So we met at my house after work for a few weeks to adapt the story and then Mitch brought a great team together to shoot it.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?
MD: The biggest challenge was creating the visual tones between the four worlds. We wanted to make each section feel different, while simultaneously having them flow into each other. Scott Siracusano, the cinematographer, put a lot of work into finding the right look for each reality. It was important that the aesthetics weren't too dynamic, but instead subtle. He wanted to approach each day as an open canvas, it was important that we didn’t control our expectation of the scene too much. That we’d go into every scene with no rules. He exposed the scenes with the intention of building most of our look in camera, while simultaneously shooting everything in a 2:1 aspect ratio to give us the ability to bend any scene into any ratio we wanted to later on. This was truly low budget, Scott was pulling his own focus and lit everything with just two lights. But instead of us seeing this as a weakness, we used the limited resources to our advantage.
The easiest part was working with our talent. Chasen and I spent months finding the right actor for each role. We even sat on scheduling our shoot dates until we locked in the entire cast. So I think because of that patience, we were able to cruise through our shoot days because everyone was really on the same page creatively. Also, big props to Max Baumgarten for playing a narcissistic asshole. He’s like the sweetest, funniest guy ever and it was wild seeing him transform.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
CB: I just saw "Made In Britain" and “Scum" for the first time. Both by Alan Clarke. And a friend just introduced me to "Come And See" by Elem Klimov. Those films crawled under my skin. I haven’t seen Paris, Texas in a long time. But recently I was camping in southern Utah alone and one day I was walking silently for so long that I felt like I was in the first part of that movie. One of those moments where you must be tripping but you’re pretty sure you didn’t take anything.
MD: I recently revisited David O. Russell’s early films "I Heart Huckabees” and “Flirting With Disaster”. These self-aware, satirical visions are very on point. I love the way he makes his male protagonists aloof, existentially lost dumb-dumbs. Also, the way he takes creative license to cover a scene is super inspiring.
5) What’s next for you?
MD: Chasen and I are planning on making a new short film every half year or so, almost like a no-stress challenge. We’d like to shoot and finish the projects within a month, once the script and cast are locked in. That's what we did with this film. We shot “Staff Pick" exactly a month ago. And I’m trying to practice putting less importance on a project so it relaxes the creativity. Sometimes I feel that sitting on a project for too long can stagnate an artist's personal progression.
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