5 Questions with Nick Verdi

Nick Verdi (left) with B.R. Yeager (center)

1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?

Filmmaking has always been a given for me. I started making movies when I was little, around 4 years old, using our family’s big bulky early 90’s video camera and my numerous action figures (Godzilla, Universal Monsters), so it’s the kind of thing I never exactly decided to do, I just always did it. I developed this extreme emotional compulsion to take pieces of my world and build a different world with those pieces. Looking back, I tend to think that the development of my identity or my psyche was deeply intertwined in filmmaking, in the act of framing my world, controlling it, saving it, living in the memory… I still haven’t decided if I think this is a healthy or unhealthy thing, but it’s most certainly helpful as a filmmaker. 

I saw many movies that I shouldn’t have when I was far too young, and it instilled in me this sense of chasing the meaning of a movie, chasing the intellectual aspect of it, through initially encountering the emotional impact of it. Watching films about adults yelling about adult problems always hit me so hard emotionally, as the emotional aspect resonated deeply, but I never really understood what the intellectual “adult” components were about, leaving me feeling lost and determined to understand what was happening with these people. Of course, a child doesn’t understand adult complexities, but they definitely register it emotionally, and in that regard, they have a deeper understanding than someone who approaches the situation intellectually. 

As I got older, I would force friends who had zero interest in acting or filmmaking to participate with me. I was often intense and demanding with them, so much that my mom has said to me “I don’t know how you kept any friends back then”. However, I firmly believe that the act of filmmaking was somehow instrumental for my friends and I in “workshopping” who we were becoming as people, in the sense that acting can allow you to consciously test out an existence as somebody you believe you are not. 

2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?

When I finally finished college at the end of 2018, I felt awful about how I had gone about creating my thesis film, a feature-length sci fi/horror movie about evil government experiments. I was drowning in this notion that I had to make this film count, that I had to be the person that made their first “real” feature at the end of school, like all those geniuses I’d grown up reading about. But of course, that manic state of proving myself by making an incredible, genre-bending, artistic experimental experience led me down the road of always focusing on the completely wrong things. At the end, I felt I had a movie that just wasn’t true, wasn’t alive, but simply a reflection of my own desire for it to be cool and different. It's a sickening feeling!

By the time I was ready to start working on another project, I had totally revised my feelings about my filmmaking and what my artistic pursuit was really all about. I knew I wanted to make something short and focused on a single character’s experience, a character study of sorts. I also knew I wanted to deal solely in stakes that exist in the day-to-day lives of regular people (that is, not “movie” people), as opposed to larger-than-life movie stakes that generally only deal with stuff like being murdered. 

I also hated having the sense that I’d never been very successful in making a film or a character that felt legitimately dangerous, and in that regard, I was so desperate to make a film that had the viewer asking where this movie came from, wondering if what they’re seeing is real or not, is this fiction or a documentary, etc. I was all about Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland, and Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny at this time, films that were concerned with the weirdness and violence of masculinity and also dealt with characters in such a moving “not movie-ish” way. It was as if these films said “Fuck making a movie, we’ve gotta take the gloves off and see what’s actually happening here with these characters”. 

I knew I would need to find an actor that would be willing to go off on a limb with me and enter some perhaps nerve-wracking territory. I’ve always loved working with non-actors because they bring something fresh and totally random to the process of filmmaking...sometimes a professional (or semi-professional) actor comes to the table too sure of their ways. I met B.R. Yeager, who has dabbled in many arts but has more recently found success as a novelist, sometime in 2016 while we were both attending Holyoke Community College. We always got along well and seemed to be on the same page regarding the state of cinema, the arts, and the goddamn world, but it wasn’t until I bumped into him again in mid-2019 that I realized he would make an incredible actor. At first he was hesitant with the idea, but we quickly came up with a scenario and a character… almost too quickly, as if this thing was already inside us, just waiting to be made. 

I’d had this vague idea for some time about a young college teacher who lashes out and physically assaults one of their students, which I honestly think comes from an element from the book The Shining, something about Jack Torrance having been fired from his teaching job for beating up a student for messing with his car, or something? I can’t even remember for sure. The character then became someone with less status, someone more isolated, totally trapped in his own notion of reality, who used his interactions with college students as a way of asserting himself in an unfair power dynamic. We wanted to create a situation that captured this notion of people living in completely separate realities and the mess that plays out when two different notions of “how things work” and “what’s right and wrong” crash into one another. I'm also always obsessed with seeing the ways in which people behave so differently when they're alone versus how they are with other people. We wrote, re-wrote, rehearsed, and workshopped from around July to December, finally shooting the thing from January to March.

3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?

I’d say the biggest challenge here was making sure we didn’t end up just making a movie about a fucked up guy and totally indulging in that. The truth is that it’s really satisfying for me to be an exhibitionsit, and that’s something that comes through in the character - he himself likes to take up space and make a scene because he finally exists in the eyes of other people when he does that. But if the movie ended up just saying “Look! We’re gross and unpleasant, fuck you!”, we would’ve totally failed. 

There was also the other obstacle of the goddamn pandemic shutting down our production (if you could call it a production) just before we got to shoot the final scene. Originally, Angel was supposed to show up at that party the guys are talking about at the start of the film, leading to a final altercation between him and Riley outside the party. When the shutdown initially started in March, B.R. and I vowed to finish this film, no matter what. But as time wore on, we felt this story had almost become like a period piece, and we decided it would be unnatural to go back to this world and continue shooting a year later or whatever... it wouldn't be correct. The film exists now as some kind of pre-pandemic omen of civil unrest that was about to arrive. I found a new way to structure the film using only what we had shot which kept leaving and then returning back to the “main” meaty scene, Angel fighting with the college kids, and I do believe this is the way the film was always supposed to be. 

The easiest part of the film was definitely staying inspired and motivated. We really loved working on it and felt some sense of personal development as we moved through the piece. I think that that will always be the easiest part of filmmaking for me, staying motivated to keep pushing on until you see this damn thing through. 

4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?

I was really moved by the new film by Joe Swanberg that NoBudge recently had up (maybe it’s bad to mention now because it’s offline at this point), Build the Wall. It inspires me to no end to see established filmmakers having no qualms with using lower-grade cameras and making movies with friends when they feel like it… it’s something I really really wish a lot more “big” filmmakers would do, because it totally demolishes this silly notion of having “made it” and looking more and more polished and big budget and professional as you develop as a filmmaker. 

I also recently watched Derek Cianfrance’s miniseries I Know This Much is True and I cannot forget this spellbinding moment in the first episode, this beautifully sustained close-up on Mark Ruffalo’s right eye, as he processes an unbelievably emotional moment… it’s a perfectly “weird” choice that utilizes sound as much as image, if not more than image, and it is absolutely pure cinema. 

5) What’s next for you?

B.R. Yeager and I have been talking about this new concept over the past few months that’s totally lit a fire inside me, I am just so ready to sink my teeth into it. It’s definitely too early to talk about it in any concrete way, but we are both going to act in it, playing white boy rappers from Western Massachusetts who develop a close bond that becomes obsessive and drifts towards aspects of the supernatural and the occult. It’s going to continue some threads that we started with Angel of the Night, in the sense that it’ll be about masculinity and the realities people construct for themselves. 

I’m really excited to keep making films that deal directly with the issue of masculinity and the psychology of men. I think most men, myself included, are desperate to see movies that are useful and instructive about how men can emotionally exist in the world in a way that lets us see the real issues there. Unchecked, un-investigated toxic masculinity will be one of the catalysts that will destroy the world, if we let it happen, and I genuinely believe that male filmmakers have an obligation to help one another out by making films that actually reflect on the spiritual toll toxic masculinity has had on men themselves, while not also just showing men being fucked up and saying “Wow, men are fucked up, huh?”. 

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IG: @verdi_nick
Twitter: @Verdi___Nick