5 Questions with Nelson Kim ("The Complaint")
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I got the film bug haunting home-video stores and NYC art-house theaters in my teens, just as the late ’80s/early ‘90s explosion in U.S. indie filmmaking was going off. Spent my twenties in the Bay Area dabbling in screenwriting and directing, then back to New York for grad school, at which point I got more serious; made a few shorts and then my first feature, SOMEONE ELSE, which came out in 2016.
2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?
At first I thought it was going to be a sort of social satire, about a professor who was happy to be stuck at home but didn’t want to admit that to her miserable student. There’s still a trace of that initial idea in the first scene, but the story quickly evolved in a different direction. I was thinking about the limits of empathy, the difficulty of understanding where other people are coming from, the question of how far we’re really willing to go to help. These are issues that regularly come up in my day job of teaching film to undergraduates, but the pandemic put them in a new light.
I also have to give props to the playwright Richard Nelson for his Zoom plays about his Apple family of characters. I watched the first one when it came out on YouTube in April, soon after I’d had the idea for the short, and it was a real lightbulb moment — it showed me that if the writing and acting were strong enough, a movie made on Zoom could be a compelling and worthwhile experience. More than that, I saw that such a movie could be interesting as cinema: I started to consider the formal properties of Zoom, how the eye processes information, how the actors in their different screens interact with each other, how the space outside the frame comes into play, how even something as mundane as actors' entrances and exits has to be rethought. So, around the time everyone else in the world was starting to get sick of Zoom, I was like, No, there’s something there...
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?
I spent almost four months trying to get the script right. It just took me a while to figure out my angle of attack, and to work out the dynamic between the two main characters. The actual making of the film was a breeze — I mean, I hope never to do another movie on Zoom again, but this thing cost almost no money and required almost no equipment and no personnel beyond me, my wonderful actors, and my post-production sound ace, Eli Cohn. Like most directors, I spend far less time doing creative work than I do dealing with the whole economic/logistical/technical/industrial apparatus of filmmaking. Here, for once, that ratio was reversed. I had to do some producing, and I had to figure out a few technical things, but mostly I was thinking about story and rehearsing with my actors, both of which are hard work but also hugely enjoyable for me. Films turn out best when everyone gets into that zone of being like kids playing in a sandbox, but usually you have to fight through a lot of stuff to reach that state. On this film, there was much less to fight through.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
I’m over the moon about two Sundance movies I just saw online: Shaka King’s JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH and Jane Schoenbrun’s WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR. Shaka’s movie brilliantly uses the tools and techniques of classical, mainstream narrative filmmaking to tell a story that I would’ve thought too radical for the mainstream. Jane’s is unique, unclassifiable, like if Roger Corman hired Chantal Akerman to make an exploitation flick about teenagers’ online lives and then Gaspar Noé dosed her with acid.
5) What’s next for you?
I’m working on what I hope will be my second feature film. One script is a psychological thriller set in NYC in 2000 as the dot-com boom is going bust. The other, still in its early stages, will attempt to address our current, seemingly insoluble political and cultural divide. Both are low budget by Hollywood standards, but they’re going to require experienced producers with access to substantial funds — although I have to say, this short has rekindled my love for just making things with my friends using whatever resources are on hand. We’ll see how it all shakes out!
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IG: @nelsonkim123 | https://www.facebook.com/nelsonkim