A period piece comedy about peasants planning small town gatherings is the new film by the comedy collective Simple Town. We asked the “Town Meeting” creators about the origins of the project, deciding to film only one shot, and using ADR to comic effect…

1) Can you talk briefly about your backgrounds, and how you first got interested in comedy and film/video making?

We all have a few different creative practices. Between all of us we have backgrounds in solo comedy, music and performance art, animation and cartooning, theater and dance, and fiction writing. When Simple Town began, it was just a group of us only making comedy videos. Later we started performing live sketch, which we were interested in, and now we do both about the same. We are trying to expand the scope of our projects, so that has led us from sketch comedy into plays, publishing zines, and short films like this one, which are not strictly sketch.

2) How did you all meet and start working together? What was the earliest seed of this project?

We all met at different times, and this latest incarnation of the group started about a year ago. Two of us were childhood friends (Will and Felipe), two of us met while at the Rhode Island School of Design (Ian and Felipe), and that’s where we met Sam, through an improv group. In college, Simple Town was just three of us, making live sketch and video, and once we finished, we moved to New York together. We met Caro doing comedy in Brooklyn, and we thought there was an affinity, so we all started working together.

We do a lot of hanging out and talking about what we’re watching and reading, and ideas tend to percolate this way. Will and Caro had been watching a lot of that British reality dating show, Love Island. We thought it was funny the sort of alliances and politics that develop when people live in a tiny social ecosystem and that turned out to be a big initial influence in designing the petty dynamics in the world of “Town Meeting.”

3) Can you walk me through a couple key development points on “Town Meeting,” like was it always going to be all one shot, and ADR’d? I love both of these decisions btw - it’s so odd and funny.

We had made a video, “On My Head a Hard Hat,” about an office worker who dreams of being a construction worker using this shooting-at-a-distance technique and this past approach came up in developing “Town Meeting.” It’s partially born of practical constraints of needing a way to shoot in locations we’re all inspired by but would have trouble gaining access to if we were to properly ask permission. So the idea to get it all in one shot came up in writing the first draft of the script to support the slow pacing and closed feeling of the world. We also do a lot of live performance, and we wanted to film something that let us work in a live way, rather than having to break up the performance.

In each of our minds I think this was imagined a little different until we got up on that hill in that field and found this beautiful painting of a landscape to set the action within. We actually shot the video with wireless lavs, but the weather was rainy that day and our best guess is that this interfered with the audio, which had static and cut out a lot. So we were kind of forced to ADR but it turned out to be super funny and gave it the feeling of a made-for-TV movie. Just one of those beautiful discoveries you make when something doesn’t go to plan.

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

All of us had seen Andrei Rublev before we made this, and we loved the atmosphere. Strange open spaces, and a lot of comedy in the way a bunch of peasants run from one place to another. That movie is a cool model for a period piece, because it feels accurate and anachronistic at the same time. We were going for that with “Town Meeting,” plus some Barry Lyndon and that movie Hard to Be A God. We love people falling in the mud a hundred years ago.

5) What’s next for you?

It would be fun to make a movie! There is plenty of good comedy TV out there but it's unclear who the next generation of movie comedy voices are. We have experimented with a webseries and some plays in the past, but we hope to continue cutting our teeth with longer narrative work.

Contact Info:

Website: http://simplesimpletowntown.com

Twitter: @simple__town

Instagram: @simple__town