Watch: Devan Scott’s Video Essay, “Why Are Movies So Dark?”

by Scott Macaulay
in Filmmaker Videos

Devan Scott

Accompanying his debut article in Filmmaker’s print edition, “Did You See (and Hear) That?),” Devan Scott posts today a video essay, “Why Are Movies So Dark?”, that provides visual backup for his points. “Contemporary visuals are commonly diagnosed as dark,’ ‘underexposed’ or ‘underlit’. In actuality, they describe an array of phenomena, many of them widely misunderstood,” he writes. “The most common charge, dim,’ is often used interchangeably with ‘underlit.’ Tools are frequently blamed; ‘the digital look’ is as much an accusation of modern equipment as an assessment of its apparent effects.” Watch Scott’s new video above.

Watch Now: Short Films from the 2024 Filmfort Film Festival

by Scott Macaulay
in Festivals & Events
on Mar 21, 2024

Filmfort Film Festival

Filmmaker is proud to continue our annual partnership with the Filmfort Film Festival by exclusively hosting six short films from this year’s lineup, which will be available to view on our site through Saturday. The three day festival—which occurs during the Treefort Music Fest in Boise, Idaho—highlights an array of emerging independent cinema. Alongside robust film programming, Filmfort also features DIY panels and filmmaker Q&As in the heart of the city’s downtown area.

Check out this year’s selection of films below.

Broken Flight
dir. Erika Valenciana, Mitchell Wenkus 2023, USA, 18 mins

Synopsis: At the Willowbrook Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, Annette drops off living birds in paper bags to intake. The chirping, moving bags, and pecked holes all show hopeful signs of life. Wildlife Keeper, Justin Sharp, identifies the birds’ species and performs flight tests. As always, the biggest challenge is catching the lively ones. Staff veterinarians take us through tedious exams. Finally, volunteers joyfully release several birds into the nearby forest preserve.

Synopsis: Stuck on the side of the road on their way to a social distance party, two contact-starved millennials try not to connect on an intimate level in this Reform Jewish absurd comedy about grief, changing plans, and the lengths we’ll go to avoid direct communication with the people we love.

Sucker
dir. Deni Cheng, 2023, USA, 18 mins

Synopsis: Andy loses his job at a local parking garage and is confronted with the realities of being the caretaker of his little brother, Tom Tom.

Unknown Heavens
dir. Erik Fox , 2023, USA 19 mins

Synopsis: In between apartments and jobs, Evelyn goes back to her hometown to house-sit her late grandmother’s place. While looking for work and struggling with the malaise of her present, she tries to reconnect with old friends and feelings. But when she receives phone calls from a mysterious yet familiar voice and her present becomes harder to face, she turns to her childhood for a way out.

Where the Bullets Go
dir. Cody Duncum, 2023, USA, 14 mins

Synopsis: When a young boy shoots at a bird and misses, he embarks on a journey to find where the bullet went.

Yaangna Plays Itself
dir. Adam Piron, 2022, USA, 7 mins

Synopsis: An ode to the memories of El Aliso, the sycamore tree that once stood at the center of Yaangna, the Indigenous Tongva village that Los Angeles grew out from. All elements sourced in the film are from the original site and the nearby Los Angeles River.

Check out the full lineup online.

“The Price of Making a Movie is That I Have to Direct It”: Todd Solondz on Happiness

by Scott Macaulay
in Directors, Interviews, Screenwriters
on Oct 16, 2023

Happiness, Todd Solondz

Todd Solondz’s indelible Happiness was released 25 years ago today. Filmmaker is reposting here its interview with Solondz, the cover story of our Fall 1998 issue. — Editor

Winner of the Critic’s Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Todd Solondz’s startling new Happiness is not only one of the most challenging and invigorating independent films of the year, it’s also, by virtue of the strange politics of its release, a talking point for prognosticators everywhere concerned with the co-option of indie-film attitude by corporate-controlled majors and mini-majors.

Ambitiously weaving five separate tales of modern alienation, romantic woe, and shocking transgression into a merciless critique of American lifestyles, Happiness balances compassion and irony, sweetness and repulsion, intelligence and gross-out humor. Following the extended family created by three sisters and their various friends, relatives, and lovers, the film is disturbingly entertaining. With spare precision, Solondz constructs and then rips open his characters, creating stories from what we can only imagine goes on behind closed doors.

Of course, earlier this year October Films, the film’s financier and distributor, dropped Happiness from its release slate after its corporate parent, Universal, objected to one of the film’s storylines — the tale of a pedophile drawn to his son’s school friends. Good Machine Releasing, the distributor formed by Good Machine, along with Killer Films Happiness‘s production company, picked up the reins, hired a distribution team, and is now planning a fall release. (Ironically, Good Machine recently moved its own overhead deal from Fox to Universal.) Whatever the politics of the film’s distribution — and there’s no doubt that these widely publicized events have given Happiness major buzz in the mainstream media — Solondz’s film represents the best meanings of the overused term “independent film.”

Filmmaker: One thing that’s remarkable about Happiness is the deftness with which it weaves together so many different storylines. Coming off of Welcome to the Dollhouse, did you intend from the beginning to do something this complex?

Todd Solondz: I had a bunch of different story ideas, and I couldn’t make up my mind which one I wanted to make a movie about. I wasn’t willing to do one over the other, so I figured out a way to combine them, hoping that they would cohere and play off each other.

Filmmaker: At what point did you realize that the film was becoming a meditation on the family in middle-class America?

Solondz: I wasn’t initially thinking about a family per se. In fact, the whole idea of three sisters was something that was contrived to thread the different storylines together. Originally there were no sisters, and everything was very discreet. The thematic connections were of much more concern to me. But I think the process of writing is a process of discovery. And it’s not until you actually finish the movie that it fully dawns on you what it’s really about.

Filmmaker: So you didn’t initially intend to explore issues concerning the family in America?

Solondz: No. But, I do think we live in a country in which alienation is more acutely felt than anywhere else in the world, and I think that, to a large degree, this is related to the sense of family that exists here. The family unit is not as tight as it is in Europe or certainly in the rest of the world. My friends will say, “I come from a close family. My sister lives in L.A., my brother in Boston, and my parents, if they are still married, live in Arizona.” And they feel they are a close family! You have to question what that closeness really is about when it is the daily fabric of your life that defines what your life is about, not Thanksgiving and Christmas.

To a certain extent, the film is about emotional disconnection. It’s a film about desire, which in our culture is something of an impediment. And, on the simplest level, these are just four or five love stories. The film tells the story of people who try to reach out and connect — reach out and touch someone, so to speak. A lot of extreme stuff goes on in the movie, but if the audience watches it and says, “Oh, look at those freaks,” I will have failed. The idea is for the audience to come half way. In the same way that the characters are struggling to connect with each other, there’s a connection that can be made between the audience and these characters. These are not freaks — when we go to the supermarket or the dry cleaner, these are people with lives who walk right by us.

Filmmaker: There is that degree of empathy in your films, but you also use humor in a way that often undercuts our sympathy for your characters’ emotional pain. You’ll throw in a joke or a funny music cue that prompts us to laugh.

Solondz: I’m very invested emotionally in these characters, and yet at the same time I have a kind of ironic detachment that enables me to laugh. I mean, I am moved by what I find funny, and vice versa. So it is hard for me to detach them, these two currents. And I think the movie would be unbearable if it were not funny.

Filmmaker: To some extent, your film explores that classic question — how much repression is a good thing?

Solondz: I think a movie like this can only come out of a society with a repressive culture. And there is nothing in the movie that isn’t in the tabloids or the daytime talk shows. The difference is that in the tabloids and talk shows there is a moralistic voice saying, “This is wrong.” But this is always undercut when they go to the close-up. There’s a titillating, freak-show aspect to it. It’s both moralistic and exploitative.

I just don’t underestimate the intelligence of my audience. I believe that they don’t have to be told that rape is wrong. The film does have a moral center; there is a moral anchoring. It’s just that there’s nothing didactic about it. I’m not preaching. I’m interested not so much in judging or punishing, but in understanding and figuring out these things.

Filmmaker: Everyone I know who has worked with you on a film says the same thing: “He knows what he wants.” I think every producer wants that quality in a director. You don’t want the director struggling to figure out what to shoot or how to stage a scene while 40 crew people are standing around. But within the world of low-budget production, does that clarity of purpose become a hindrance? Because, of course, there are obviously times when you can’t get what you want due to limited time or budget.

Solondz: That’s a hard thing for a director to gauge. You’re told, “You can have A or B, but you can’t have A and B.” But as a director, you want A and B! I don’t want people to say at the end of the day, “You know, it was a great production. We got it in on budget!” I don’t care if we get it in on budget. If we go over budget that’s fine with me if I get what I want. The question is, can you go over budget? And those things are always so mysterious.

Filmmaker: In studio films, sometimes there’s an expectation that you’ll go over budget, but in independent films there often is a finite amount of money raised.

Solondz: Well, this had a fixed budget from October Films. Bingham Ray and company saw a rough cut early on because we needed more money for post, and he gave us more. Things can happen. I was told, ” You can’t afford to go shoot in Florida. Todd, if you want Florida, you are going to lose this.” And I grabbed Florida, and in the end I got that as well. Because once you say you’ll drop something, it’s lost forever. So basically you just try and get as much as you can. It’s not about greed. It’s a conviction you have about what’s important. And sometimes you can be wrong, but I’d rather be wrong than the producers be wrong.

Filmmaker: How much of these production problems do you try to figure out early in pre-production?

Solondz: You try to figure out as much as you can. Going into it, did I think it was a realistic shooting schedule? No. Did I say it was very unrealistic? Yes. But that was the way I had to go into it. I’m glad I made the decisions I made because had I just yielded at that time, I would have dropped characters and scenes. And I could have done that and made it a lot easier for people, myself included. Because, believe me, I hate production. So as much as I’m trying to get an extra day of shooting, it’s just an extra day of hell I’m asking for myself. But it takes experience to gauge when it’s an absolute “no” instead of a “probably no.”

Filmmaker: How do you tell the difference?

Solondz: It’s just an instinct about the people you’re working with. You have to read everything. Everyone wants to be right, everyone is vulnerable to being wrong, and no one wants to be blamed. I’m not interested in blaming anyone. I’m just interested in getting the script up there in the way that I want. And that makes production much more difficult. We had an extremely arduous shoot. I had a great crew, and I really got on well with everyone, but it was horrible — we had days that went to 20 hours. This is just not fair, and yet when it’s your movie, you just keep pushing. My job is not to manage the crew or appease the producers. My job is to make as good a movie as I can. Obviously, I bear some responsibility for what is going on, but the point isn’t to make everyone happy. Sometimes, in fact, it is truly impossible, and then you have to come up with another way of making things work. You rewrite or restage or redesign something to accommodate the fact that you have certain economic pressures.

Filmmaker: Has your attitude towards production changed from your first film to this one, your third?

Solondz: No, that’s how I feel. And I don’t enjoy it, I really don’t. The price of making a movie is that I have to direct it, and I don’t get pleasure from that.

Filmmaker: What do you dislike most about production?

Solondz: Everything from the first day of shooting until the end. Every single day more and more compromises have to be made. All those shots you planned — “Sorry, Todd, you can’t have it all, because the sun is going to set and the location does not exist tomorrow.” Being up against that stress every day gives me no pleasure. I don’t get any high or thrill from having all this so-called power. It does nothing for me or my ego. It’s great working with people I like, but everyone’s under such tremendous strain. Ideally, if we had a budget that was bigger, we could breathe a little more easily. There would still be stress, but I think it could be a little more manageable.

Filmmaker: What is the most important thing for you to have during production, what element of the set or the atmosphere?

Solondz: A good lunch. Good meals. No, the most important is to have people who are supportive of me. And I felt for all the economic stress, that people were supportive of me on this film. That was a great feeling.

Filmmaker: What about in terms of working with the actors? This movie depends on subtle performances by actors whom you’re willing to follow into some very dark places. How do you go about casting and then working with them on their characters?

Solondz: You go through this process of casting, of seeing and talking to the actors, of reading with them — whatever your technique is of getting to know these people — and you make a leap of faith. You just go on instinct. And you could be wrong. It happens all the time. And if you are lucky and have a lot of money, you recast in the middle of the movie. Woody Allen has done that more than once.

Filmmaker: Do you rehearse a lot with your actors?

Solondz: No. I just felt that when I met them and they read, that it clicked. I didn’t feel I needed any more.

Filmmaker: What was it about Dylan Baker that sort of sold you for that part? He’s a silent character in some ways.

Solondz: He is a great actor. And people don’t know him. That is one of the appealing things about discovering someone, particularly for a role like this, where you want a sort of benign, faceless, guy next door, someone you might trust. A guy you can sympathize with. Because he is not a monster. He is a great father struggling with a monster within, and that distinction is key to that part of the movie. He transgresses. And if there is redemption for him — and I say “if” — it is in the honesty and love he has for his older son, before whom he cannot but tell the truth.

Filmmaker: That redemption certainly doesn’t save him from punishment.

Solondz: No, but I don’t think that’s contradictory. And, as I said, it’s an “if” — I did not say there was redemption.

Filmmaker: The film has a coda at the end, and all the other characters are there. His punishment is that he’s removed from the narrative.

Solondz: But he’s very present in that scene, even though he isn’t there.

Filmmaker: What about that shot of Ben Gazarra pouring salt on his food in that scene? Earlier in the film, the doctor told him to lay off the salt. Now, you can read this shot in two ways, and it goes back to that discussion about repression versus personal freedom. On one hand, he’s got a death wish going on; it’s a subtle way of committing suicide. On the other, he’s saying, “Screw the doctor, I’m going to live my life.”

Solondz: I’m more optimistic about some characters than others in terms of their fate. Here is a guy whom you could almost look at like a patriarch, who did try to escape a kind of dead end in his life, and, in the end, is left with emptiness and resignation. But with the Florida scenes, it was very important to me to give a context to everything, so it was not a movie about a bunch of perverts — there is a certain malaise that seeps through all the stories. It doesn’t have to be as extreme as the [story involving the pedophile], which is the heaviest manifestation. But there is a kind of malaise, a lack of connection that is kind of an illness, and that is there to be explored and understood.

For me, Happiness isn’t even about sexuality — the sex is very much used as a device, a motive to propel and also explore and understand the themes I have spoken of. Because pedophilia is something I, in fact, know very little about beyond what any casual reader of papers and magazines does. I didn’t do any research for this movie.

Filmmaker: Can you talk about your work with Maryse Alberti and the production designer Therese DePrez? Because there are a lot of really drab color schemes in the film, but certain moments of color really jump out.

Solondz: The key word was restraint. The film is about the actors, it’s not a showpiece for any of the craft people’s departments. For example, we wanted the suburban home in Maplewood to not be tacky or kitchy or a joke. There is nothing more distasteful to me than glibly disparaging the suburbs. I have been guilty of disparaging them, but I think it’s boring, because what is interesting about the suburbs is what’s appealing, what’s seductive about them.

Filmmaker: What do you think is missing right now from the independent movies that are made?

Solondz: Well, there are never enough entertaining movies.

Filmmaker: How important is that concept of entertainment to you in terms of your own work?

Solondz: The whole thing about entertainment is that it implies that there’s “it” and there’s “you,” and “it” is there to provide a certain amount of pleasure. I feel I need that pleasure no matter how serious or esoteric the film. I mean, Alexander Sokurov — I am moved by the beauty of his films, and I am also entertained. As long as I am somewhat stimulated, there can be an entertainment level to it. But there’s entertainment, and then there is engagement. And ideally both can happen. When I saw There’s Something About Mary, it was very entertaining and also very engaging. I felt it was a very heartfelt movie, much more personal and meaningful than many so-called independent movies. So you find it where you can.

Editor’s Note: Distribution and production company details have been corrected since this piece’s original publication.

Trailer Watch: Godfrey Reggio’s Once Within a Time

by Scott Macaulay
in Filmmaker Videos
on Oct 9, 2023

Godfrey Reggio, Once Within a Time, Oscilloscope Laboratories, philip glass

Koyaanisqatsi director Godfrey Reggio returns with his first feature in a decade, Once Within a Time, opening this Friday at New York’s IFC Center from Oscilloscope Labs. In Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2014 issue, Reggio, co-director Jon Kane and DP Trish Govoni discussed the “perfect image” of his last feature, Visitors, which was comprised of just 74 black-and-white shots, each running 70 or so seconds. Made during the COVID-19 pandemic, the animated Once Within a Time is a very different work, described as “a bardic fairy tale about the end of the world and the beginning of a new one, tinged with apocalyptic comedy, rapturous cinematography, unforgettable vistas, and the innocence and hopes of a new generation.” Reggio’s longtime collaborator, composer Philip Glass, contributes the score, with additional vocals from Sussan Deyhim, and, like Visitors, the film is co-directed by veteran editor and filmmaker Jon Kane.

SAG-AFTRA Votes to Strike, Shutting Down Film and Television Production

by Scott Macaulay
in Filmmaking, Production
on Jul 13, 2023

SAG-AFTRA

SAG-AFTRA is joining WGA on the Hollywood picket lines. Following the collapse Wednesday of its negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the union voted to strike, effective tonight at 12:01 AM. It’s the union’s first motion picture and television strike since 1980 and the first time since 1960 that both the actors’s and writers’ unions have concurrently struck.

“We had no choice,” said SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher at a live-streamed news conference this afternoon. “We are the victims here. We are being victimized by a very greedy entity.” She continued, “I cannot believe it, quite frankly, how far apart we [and the AMPTP] are on so many things. It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history.”

Among the issues at stake are higher wages, writers’ room staffing, performance-based streaming residuals and artificial intelligence (AI). The latter topic has grown in importance over recent months — it prominently figured in the halted WGA negotiations as well — as sites and platforms such as ChatGPT and RunwayML have made it easier to imagine how these technologies could disrupt the creative labor market.

Said National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland at the press conference, “This ‘groundbreaking’ AI proposal that they gave us yesterday [was] that our background performers should be able to be scanned and get paid for one day’s pay and their companies should own that scan their image, their likeness to be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation.”

Added Drescher, “This is a moment of history and is a moment of truth. If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble. We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines and big business who cares more about Wall Street than you and your family.”

Drescher said at the press conference that she expects the strike to probably last “a while,” echoing anonymous quotes in an incendiary Deadline report that enraged union members in the final hours of negotiations. (A studio executive was quoted saying, “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”)

In addition to acting services, the strike vote prohibits SAG-AFTRA members from engaging in publicity services for work covered under the TV/theatrical contracts, including interviews, festivals, awards shows, podcasts and social media. Also prohibited are “Negotiating and/or entering into and/or consenting to agreement to perform covered services in the future,” meaning productions will not be able to make offers to actors during the strike.” The document continues, “Members must instruct their agent and/or other representatives to discontinue conducting negotiations on their behalf with the studios, streamers and networks for covered services.”

A list of prohibited activities for SAG-AFTRA can be found at the official Strike Notice and Order.

More positively for independents seeking to work with SAG-AFTRA members, the document also says, “Members may be able to work on projects produced by non-AMPTP-related production companies under these agreements if such projects qualify for an Interim Agreement.” Productions eligible for such agreements will be ones that have no financial connection to an AMPTP signatory and will require, it is expected, committing to honoring the terms of the final negotiated agreement between SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP. Productions that have qualified for such Interim Agreements will be listed on a new SAG-AFTRA strike website (currently password protected).

The AMPTP responded to SAG-AFTRA with a statement:

AMPTP member companies entered the negotiations with SAG-AFTRA with the goal of forging a new, mutually beneficial contract. The AMPTP presented a deal that offered historic pay and residual increases, substantially higher caps on pension and health contributions, audition protections, shortened series option periods, and a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members. A strike is certainly not the outcome we hoped for as studios cannot operate without the performers that bring our TV shows and films to life. The Union has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry.

Further details about the terms offered by AMPTP can be found at Deadline.

In addition to shutting down the majority of American film production, and much shooting abroad, the strike has the potential of, as noted earlier, impacting festivals and awards season. Already organizers at Telluride, Venice, Toronto and New York are contemplating events without actors on the red carpet. (“Fall festivals are fucked,” said one studio executive quoted at Variety.)

Trailer Watch: Brian Vincent’s ’80s NYC Art World Doc, Make Me Famous

by Scott Macaulay
in Filmmaker Videos
on Jun 26, 2023

Brian Vincent, Documentary, Edward Brezinski, Heather Spore, Make Me Famous

Currently boasting 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and heading into its second weekend in New York theaters is Brian Vincent‘s Make Me Famous, a self-distributed documentary about the 1980s New York art world centered around painter Edward Brezinski. A notable figure from the era that spawned Nan Goldin, Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Wojnarowicz, he never attained their level of recognition and subsequently disappeared — a disappearance the filmmakers try to solve.

From the press materials:

A madcap romp through the 1980’s NYC art scene amid the colorful career of painter, Edward Brezinski, hell-bent on making it. What begins as an investigation into Brezinski’s legacy and mysterious disappearance becomes a sharp, witty portrait of NYC’s 1980s downtown art scene resulting in an irresistible snapshot of an unknown artist that captures the spirit of an iconic era.

Make Me Famous is produced by Heather Spore and has the following scheduled theatrical dates:

• June 26 and 28 at Alamo Drafthouse, Lower Manhattan

• June 30 – July 2 at Roxy Cinema, 2 Avenue of the Americas, Cellar Level

• June 30 – July 2 at New Plaza Cinema, 35 W. 67th St.

LA
• July 10 – July 11 at Laemmle Theaters, Glendale, Monica, Claremont locations

Tickets can be bought here at the link.

“I Wanted You To Feel Like These Kids Need a Tetanus Shot By the End of It”: Weston Razooli on His Cannes-Premiering Neo-Fairy-Tale Adventure, Riddle of Fire

by Scott Macaulay
in Directors, Interviews, Screenwriters
on May 26, 2023

Cannes Film Festival 2023, Riddle of Fire, Weston Razooli

Weston Razooli’s debut feature, Riddle of Fire, premiering in the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight, begins with a charming and clever premise. After we watch a trio of masked kid adventurers steal a video game console from a warehouse, escaping from the pursuing security guard on their dirt bikes, they’re unable to play it. One of their moms has placed a parental lock on the TV, and, recovering from an illness, she’ll only give them the password if they get her a blueberry pie — something her own mom used to give her when she was sick as a child. With the shelves at the town’s bakery bare, the three kids decide to bake the pie themselves, and their search narrows to one missing ingredient: a speckled egg. But while the video game sits at home, the TV frozen on the launch screen, the quest for that egg takes on its own playful feeling of epic adventure, a saga informed by the narrative structure and logic of not just video and roleplaying games but classic children’s adventure tales. The three must venture into a mountain forest and tangle with the Enchanted Blade Gang, led by an ominous matriarch seemingly able to control her subjects by voice command. Razooli tells this story with a visual style that is precise in its framing and cutting and appealingly lo-fi in its 16mm look and ’70s-era graphics, and with astonishing young actors who boast idiosyncratic gravitas. A “PG-13 Gummo” is what Razooli told me in Cannes he was trying to make, although one could also think of The Goonies, Escape from Witch Mountain and even, as we discuss below, the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone. Like the films of Panos Cosmatos, Riddle of Fire feels the work of a filmmaker still in touch with his earliest inspirations and enthusiasms while able to transmute them through a more knowing, adult point-of-view.

We started our chat, which covers how this relatively unknown filmmaker debuted in Cannes, his expansive aspirations for his production company, and his commitment to 16mm, with him explaining how one line of dialogue that kept making me laugh came about.

Filmmaker: Whenever the character of Jodie [Skyler Peters] had that line, “We should have gone to Nacho Mama’s,” I would crack up.

Razooli: It’s actually a reference to a restaurant in Park City that was big in the ‘90s and early 2000s. Every ‘90s kid that grew up in Park City knows Nacho Mamas. And [Jodie] invented the second time it was said. His mom said, “He wants to say a line to kind of end [the movie.]” I was like, “Yes, totally.” So the first line is, “Why can’t we go to the Mexican market by Nacho Mamas?” And then the last line is, “We should have gone to the place by Nacho Mamas.” I love specific references — all the places they mention, like Nacho Mamas or the Silver Mine Chateau, are real places.” It’s a very Stand By Me-style.

Filmmaker: I love that the film is about the imaginative power of play, but in their minds the kids can’t play because of the lock on their TV. But then the adventure becomes its own kind of play.

Razooli: Very much. And about the whole “video game versus real play,” yeah, they want the pass, but they end up going on adventure that’s akin to a video game. And then, hopefully with the final shot, you take away that the friendship is what matters. But you can go on an adventure and still have video game time with your friends too. Some of my fondest memories as a kid are playing split screen Halo with my friends in the early 2000s.

Filmmaker: So you grew up in Park City?

Razooli: Yeah, I grew up riding dirt bikes and playing paintball and Airsoft and running around the woods of the mountains of Utah with my friends. I’m a big fly fisher and would just wander around the mountain streams and daydream about stories. I’m attracted to enchanted forests and the magic of the woods, so I guess those are some of the elements [in the film].

Filmmaker: Just give me the quick origin story about getting into film. You did shorts and msic videos?

Razooli: I started writing stories in like first, second, third grades. I was a big reader, like a bookworm with Lord of the Rings and the Redwall series, which was big in the ’90s. I would write these stories and draw big maps on sections of printer paper and [connect them] all together. And then, classic story, I got a little camcorder when I was 10 for my birthday. I started filming stop action with Playmobile and Lego figures. Then, in high school, my friends and I would make things and tried to get more ambitious.

Filmmaker: Did you go to film school?

Razooli: No, I went to art school and studied graphic design and illustration and a little bit of fashion. I majored in illustration, but my intentions were to always make movies but to apply all that stuff to filmmaking. There are so many mediums that go into filmmaking, not just writing and directing, but costume design, concept design, graphic titles, graphic design and stuff. So I like to do all that.

Filmmaker: When the Directors Fortnight lineup came out, your name was new to me. In all of our tracking here at Filmmaker we missed you.

Razooli: Well, this is my first movie. I made no-budget, no-crew shorts.

Filmmaker: Did those go anywhere? 

Razooli: Jolly Boy Friday played at the Lower East Side Film Festival [in 2016]. I’ve been trying to get a feature going since then.

Filmmaker: And how did Riddle of Fire become the first film? Was this the one you always wanted to make, or was it one of many?

Razooli: I’ve written several other scripts. But the budgets were too big, so I was writing them smaller and smaller. I was developing a script called Riley Can You Hear Me? for a long time, a high school teenage drama comedy kind of thing. But I got really sick of it. It wasn’t purely me. I wanted to make a movie that’s purely me, and I’m all about action adventure movies, so I wrote Riddle of Fire quickly in 2021. 

Filmmaker: How did you get on people’s radar for the financing?

Razooli: I mean just real old-school pitching, trying to meet people, getting some random connections. This person knows this person knows this person. But I never really was on anyone’s radar until this movie got selected. It’s been as indie as it can.

Filmmaker: Is your financing all private equity?

Razooli: Yes, it took three years. I pitched to thousands of investors and producers. It’s mostly angel investors and small amounts from people I met along the way. I also partnered with the Utah Film Center, a non-profit where you can accept donations from foundations and individuals. And then I got the Utah film tax credit, which is 20%.

Filmmaker: You say you were writing for smaller and smaller budgets, but your film is packed with stuff. Action sequences, night scenes, kids, stunts, kids on dirt bikes —

Razooli: Jumping out of truck beds.

Filmmaker: All the jumping! Every time the kids jumped off some high place I flinched.

Razooli: Lorelei [Mote] played Petal, and she’s a gymnast. We had a pad down there and stunt coordinators. It looks like she really jumps, but it was all very safe. The moms were always there, and I would always tell the kids [the whole scenes] and say, “If you don’t want to do any of it you do not have to.” But the kids were always like “Yeah, we want to do it!” They cried a couple of times when we ran out of time [and couldn’t do scenes]. And they couldn’t actually ride their bikes. We had three stunt rider kids, two brothers and their little sister who matched the sizes of the kids perfectly. One of them is a famous skier in Utah. Since they were in masks, we could do that.  Modern cinema about children is so sterile these days. I wanted you to feel like these kids need a tetanus shot by the end of it! I love those old forgotten Disney movies like The Apple Dumpling Gang, The Biscuit Eater, Escape to Witch Mountain. And Stand by Me.

Filmmaker: I love the opening, which is very Leone-esque.

Razooli: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of my favorite movies. It’s the only movie I watch during production. Sometimes I need to watch a movie to like fall asleep and I only watch The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. There’s so much in my head [after a shoot day], and it’s so visual. 

Filmmaker: How many days was your shoot?

Razoli: Twenty days. But seven-hour days because with kids SAG lets you have eight hours, and it’s also portal-to-portal [on a location shoot]. So once they leave the hotel the clock starts. 

Filmmaker: So how did you pull this off? I presume it was pretty precisely storyboarded or shot-listed. 

Razooli: I storyboarded most of it, but not all. I shot-listed everything. Honestly, it was extremely risky. It was almost a bad idea to make a movie like this in this amount of shooting days but I’ve just always worked run and gun and with no time. I just bet on luck and knowing that if I cast the right people and it looks the right way that I’d be confident in my ability to direct [the kids] and edit it in a way that’s acceptable.

Filmmaker: How long did you take to find the kids?

Razooli: I think around three months. The two boys were from Utah and the two girls from LA and they were all through my casting director Jeff Johnson, who’s also a great actor. 

Filmmaker: The kids have a tremendous amount of poise and can deliver lines that have a kind of heightened, theatrical quality at times.

Razooli: It’s funny you say that because, for example, Charlie Silver, who plays Hazel, he does these big plays, and his immediate thing is to emote a lot. 

Filmmaker: He has a big presence.

Razooli: Yeah, I had to calm him down to not emote so much. I explained to him [about] his character, “You’re sleepy.” I was like, “Picture Tom Sawyer. He’s playing hooky from school, fishing on a sunny river bank, he’s got his hat over his face and he’s sort of fallen asleep by the river. He’s just kinda sun-baked, tired and sleepy.” And that kind of put the cream into the coffee of his emoting.

Filmmaker: I love that you incorporated magic into the movie. But, at the same time, by the end of the film you could almost imagine that the kids had imagined the whole magic element.

Razooli: All the characters are based on a fairytale archetype. The kids are goblins and in the gang, Anna-Freya [Lio Tipton] is a witch, Petal is a fairy, John Redrye [Charles Halford] is like a huntsman. And then my character Marty is a troll, like a troll servant. And the twins [Andrea and Rachel Browne] are like ghosts. Originally I wasn’t going have magic because it felt like kind of a weird choice. But when I was writing the script, I ran into a wall in the plot. It was at the end of the second act and I needed to get the kids from back to town from the mountain. I couldn’t really figure out a way. For a while they were going to hop a train but then I thought, okay, if I incorporate magic, if two characters can essentially control people, it’ll allow me to hack the plot of my own script.

Filmmaker: And then you had to go backwards and set that up.

Razooli: Exactly. It’s very video game stuff. Like the twins are kind of like the NPCs, the non-player characters, of the movie. And then that kind of solidified the whole neo-fairy-tale thing. But it’s definitely a weird choice. Sometimes people call it a fantasy film, and I’m like, “It’s not a fantasy film at all.” But I guess it technically is because of the magic.

Filmmaker: But it all comes back to the real world when the cops arrive.

Razooli: Yeah, they literally flip the lights on. I like police to represent reality because the law always wins no matter what in my stories. My other scripts are all about con artists, gangs, mischievous children, but the cops always win. It’s like you don’t have heist movies where the heist people get away. In the end, everyone gets their comeuppance. Do you know Dungeons & Dragons? All my main characters are basically chaotic-neutral. It’s a world where laws are things created by humans, but you can bend them or try to get around them as much as you can, but the law always wins. I like that as a narrative device. You need to have rules and stakes, and the law has to be pretty black and white. 

Filmmaker: What was it like growing up in Park City? Did you go to the Sundance Film Festival?

Razooli: Not really. If you’re a local, it’s just annoying. My family would leave town during the festival. Or, in high school, we would go and just try to crash the parties.

Filmmaker: You edited the film as well?

Razooli: Yeah, the post-production took a long time because it was basically me just doing pretty much everything except sound and color. I just finished in late February.

Filmmaker: You taught yourself how to edit?

Razooli: Yeah, I learned how to edit on iMovie back in 2005 and then learned Final Cut Pro and Premiere. But, I mean, YouTube — you can learn anything on YouTube now. Right when I finished it in February, I submitted it to Cannes, and then five days later I got an email from Julien Rejl, the director of Directors’ Fortnight, saying that he loved the movie and that it was in consideration. Then we had a Zoom interview and they told me two or three days after that. It was like someone flipped the switch on my whole career. And now I’ve partered with David Atrakchi at Fulldawa Films. They have offices in France and Los Angeles, and they’ve been essential to finishing the film, getting the whole DCP. We made a 35mm print too. 

Filmmaker: Tell me about the choice to shoot on 16mm.

Razooli: I love film, but the main thing is that I felt shooting on 16mm would give me the confidence to pull off the stylized world I was attempting to pull off. This kind of neo-fairy-tale, weird movie, by shooting on film it gives you a slight dreamlike distance where you can accept it. Digital you would just see through it.

Filmmaker: There’s no visible VFX in the film.

Razooli: We had to add speckles to the egg shot when the crate is opened. And there’s little things like reflection removals. We used a taxidermy elk head when the elk appears, and for a while I thought we needed to redo it like a CG elk. But everyone was like, “No, it will ruin the vibe,” and I agreed. So no CG.

Filmmaker: And the company, Anaxia, that’s you? 

Razooli: As of now, it’s just me, but I’m trying to build it into a real production company. We’ll do movies, but also fashion lines, object art and little merch things. And then I also want to do events, weird parties and stuff, like the art movement Futurism, where they would do an art show on a Zeppelin and serve bizarre dishes and make it this whole spectacle. I want do to that stuff with Anaxia. 

13 Films to Anticipate at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival

by Scott Macaulay
in Festivals & Events
on May 17, 2023

Cannes Film Festival 2023

With the Cannes Film Festival underway and Vadim Rizov and Blake Williams readying their first dispatches, here, from our team, are 13 films that we think should be on your radar here on the Croisette.

Asteroid City. Following Moonrise Kingdom and The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson’s newest film is his third to premiere at Cannes. Asteroid City boasts a typically sprawling ensemble cast of both returning regulars (Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe) and high-profile new additions (including Tom Hanks and Scarlett Johansson). While the thematic elements are familiar—dead and disappointing parents, extremely ambitious playwrights and a dedicated elementary school teacher are all present—the presence of aliens is definitely new, and the look, accurately describable as “Looney Tunes meets Red Desert,” is immaculate and uncanny. — Vadim Rizov

Anselm. German filmmaker Wim Wenders is, along with James Cameron and Ang Lee, one of the last men standing in the film industry’s underachieving Digital 3D wave. Indeed, this documentary portrait of artist Anselm Kiefer—shot in 6K and unlikely to ever be seen in that resolution—is the first 3D film to screen in Cannes in the last five years (the most recent, of course, being Bi Gan’s post-converted 3D dream-along, Long Day’s Journey Into Night). It’s also the first film Wenders has shot in the format since the one-two punch of Every Thing Will Be Fine (2015) and The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez (2016). But Wenders’s stereoscopic period achieved acclaim not for the unfortunate instances in which he applied it to fiction; his portrait of the late Pina Bausch is one of the most commercially and critically successful documentaries of this century and remains the only 3D film to earn a spine number in the Criterion Collection. I don’t believe I’ve seen any of Kiefer’s sculptures in person, but I did see and enjoy Sophie Fiennes’s film about the artist’s site-specific installation “La Ribaut,” Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow—also a Special Screening premiere in Cannes, back in 2010. I don’t anticipate Anselm will satisfy any sort of realist fantasy of “being there,” but I’m excited to see Wenders’s camera collaborate with Kiefer’s senses of history, material and space. — Blake Williams

Riddle of Fire. With his debut edition, incoming Directors Fortnight artistic director Julien Rejl has promised to take the Cannes section, created as an alternative to the main program in 1969 following the protests of May ’68, back to its founding “by filmmakers for filmmakers” mission (a tagline that resonates with us here at Filmmaker.) The section’s aims: “To seek out singular cinematic writing over and above categories and genres, and to welcome hybrid forms; to refuse all kinds of quotas relating to nationality, sex or genre; to not prioritise films which already have distributors and sales agents, to avoid the pitfall of overly standardised films and to not favour high-quality feature films which might be selected for the official competition, because the Directors’ Fortnight is first and foremost a place of discovery.” So this American-independent-focused editor-in-chief is especially looking forward to L.A.-based Weston Razooli’s Riddle of Fire, the U.S. title I knew the least about when the lineup dropped and, as the festival starts, has just the sparest of websites. The picture is dubbed a Wyoming-set “neo-Western fairy tale” about “three mischievous children as they embark on an odyssey when their mother asks them to run an errand.”  — Scott Macaulay

The Delinquents. Early word on this Un Certain Regard selection by Rodrigo Moreno has raised comparisons to another playful recent Argentinian film, Trenque Lauquen, that starts from a simple premise to expand unpredictably outwards via branching stories-within-stories. (Both films also share an important cast member, Laura Peredes.) That expansive method would explain the three-hour runtime for a movie with a relatively simple premise (disgruntled coworkers + a heist = cinema) and hopefully promises an unpredictably good time. — VR

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. For an unknown quantity, Pham Thien An’s debut feature grabbed my attention fairly immediately, first with a strong batch of initial publicity images (well-composed glimpses of characters contemplating Southeast Asian rural and urban landscapes through a variety of windows; my fest-filler detector was not triggered), then with its running time—182 minutes, a sweet spot for cine-indulgence I tend to have patience for. Inside the Yellow Coccoon Shell was adapted from Pham’s Stay Awake, Be Ready, a 14-minute, single-take short centered around a motorbike accident, a film that won the Quinzaine’s Illy Prize in 2019. Cocoon allegedly expands outward from the accident to follow a character’s faith-challenging quest to locate his brother. Unsurprisingly, Pham’s filmmaking practice began with a focus on cinematography. In 2015, he moved from Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) to my own hometown of Houston, Texas, as if I needed another element to draw me in. — BW

Close Your Eyes. The premiere of Scorsese’s latest epic may have grabbed most of the headlines and hype leading up to and following this year’s lineup announcement, but for my money Cannes 2023’s “event” is the return of Víctor Erice, whose hasn’t made a fiction feature since 1992’s El sol del membrillo. Close Your Eyes is Erice’s first long project since his 2007 correspondence film with Abbas Kiarostami. Membrillo topped, among other influential polls, the esteemed Cinematheque Ontario’s survey of Best Films of the 1990s, and Erice’s earlier work, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and El sur (1983), remain landmarks of late- and post-Franco Spanish cinema. At 169 minutes, Close Your Eyes is nearly twice as long as anything Erice has ever made, suggesting a clog of pent-up creative urges that finally found a means to burst. — BW

The Pot-au-Feu. After a series of tepidly received films that followed his reputation-making trio of The Scent of Green Papaya, Cyclo and The Vertical Ray of the Run, Vietnamese-born director Tran Anh Hung returns with an adaptation of Marcel Rouff’s gastronomically-fixated The Passion of Dodin-Bouffant. The logline of the movie is centered around a romance that, in the novel, has already ended by the time the story’s begun; that suggests a loose adaptation but one nonetheless likely to join Babette’s Feast and Big Night in the ranks of food-forward films. — VR

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed. It’s been a decade since New York-based independent filmmaker Joanna Arnow’s feature debut, i hate myself:), and five years since her Berlinale Silver Bear-winning short, Bad at Dancing. With her latest, the Directors’ Fortnight-premiering The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, the director stars in a film that, from its synopsis, continues her exploration of gender, sexuality, kink and various forms of alt-relationships. This time, however, Arnow’s protagonist, Annie (played by the filmmaker) is confronting the thirthysomething emotion helpfully delineated by the film’s title. Arnow’s previous work has been raw and emotionally fearless — as she wrote here upon the release of i hate myself:), “By confronting what was uncomfortable in this film, I hoped to encourage others to look at who they are more openly too. I wanted this film to help change our culture of shame and conformity by challenging accepted norms of behavior” — and this looks to follow suit. — SM

The Sweet East. Never Rarely Something Always‘s Talia Ryder is the heroine in debuting director Sean Price Williams’s Directors’ Fortnight picaresque,  traveling along a grubby American East Coast, where, beginning with Washington, D.C., the country’s foundational mythologies lie ready for all manner of creative destruction. Critic Nick Pinkerton makes his screenwriting debut with this Candide/Candy-like story (although his stated references are more “Moll Flanders and Thackeray and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” — along with, he adds in the press notes, Two-Lane Blacktop and Candy Mountain). Williams, of course, is the legendary New York cinematographer often known for his disarmingly poetic celluloid aesthetic. (His credits include independent pictures by the Safdie Brothers, Michael Almereyda, Owen Kline, Jessica Oreck and Alex Ross Perry, and he shoots here as well.) Supporting players include Red Rocket‘s Simon Rex, Euphoria‘s Jacob Elordi, the Butthole Surfers’s Gibby Haynes and as a pair of street-casting filmmakers whose hyperbolic enthusiasm will be familiar to anyone who has attended a project market, Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris. — SM

Eureka. The premiere “art” film of this year’s Cannes line-up, the long-gestating and highly-anticipated Eureka is Argentinian filmmaker Lisandro Alonso’s time- and geography-hopping epic that claims to examine the Americas’ indigenous populations over the centuries. The synopsis poetically mentions something about a bird (the eponymous Eureka!) and the nature of humanity. Whatever it’s “about” (I’m trying to go in as cold as possible, so excuse the lack of details), it’s sure to be among the more provocative, aesthetically demanding and visually rapturous films of the festival. — BW

May December. Reuniting director Julianne Moore (co-starring here alongside Natalie Portman) with director Todd Haynes — their first pairing since the 1995 classic Safe — Competition title May December also, astonishingly, represents the director’s first largely contemporary-set theatrical feature since that film as well. A rare U.S. independent acquisition title premiering in Cannes (another one is later on this list), the picture is based on a Black List-placing script by casting director-turned-screenwriter Samy Burch about a journalist (Portman) researching a biographical story about an actress (Moore) and her much younger husband (Charles Melton), still together and with college-bound kids more than 20 years after their age-gapped relationship’s scandalous early days. – SM

Anatomy of a Fall. Very funny as an extremely frazzled director in Justine Triet’s terrific previous film, Sybil, Sandra Hüller reteams with the idiosyncratic auteur for what MK2 Films’s website describes as a “Hitchcockian procedural thriller.” Given the unpredictable, genre-stretching shape of Triet’s previous work, it’s safe to expect that there will be more than just plot surprises in her new film, co-written with Arthur Harari, who’s acted in all of Triet’s features to date (he’s also one of the stars of this year’s Directors Fortnight opener, The Goldman Case) and is a director in his own right, most recently of the excellent Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle. — VR

Black Flies. Following 2017’s Thai-boxing picture A Prayer Before Dawn Jean-Stephane Sauvaire, who previously directed the Liberian child soldier film Johnny Mad Dog, returns to Cannes, this time in Competition, with Black Flies. It’s the New York-based French director’s first film toplined by American movie stars — Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan — and another acquisition title. Sauvaire’s cinematic milieu customarily features violent cultures and combustible situations, captured with propulsive immediacy and doc-style verisimilitude, so this thriller about two New York City emergency paramedics, a veteran and his young partner, promises fireworks in the center of its frame but also exploding in from the edges. — SM

State Hopping: The U.S. Film Tax Credit Landscape

by Scott Macaulay
in Filmmaking, Issues, Production
on Mar 16, 2023

film tax credits, Spring 2023

As the pandemic exited its first lockdowns and film production tentatively recommenced amid overall economic uncertainty, the fate of U.S. tax incentives for feature film and television appeared cloudy. Wrote James Cutchin in the Los Angeles Business Journal on August 20, 2020, “State coffers have been drained after months of lockdowns, starved of key tax revenues and exhausted by the costs of fighting the virus. With states facing such bleak financial outlooks, some wonder whether governments will continue to fund film tax credit programs.” Two and a half years later, those worries have been largely banished. Last fall in an […]

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“How Do You Talk About It as a Murder When You Think It’s an Accident?” Citizen Sleuth Director Chris Kasick on His SXSW-Premiering Mile Marker 181 Doc

by Scott Macaulay
in Directors, Interviews, SXSW
on Mar 12, 2023

Chris Kasick, Citizen Sleuth, Documentary, Emily Nestor, Mile Marker 181, SXSW 2023

In the nine years since Serial, the “true crime podcaster” has become, variously, a career goal, sociological type and, in TV shows like Only Murders in the Building, object of satire. In Citizen Sleuth, world premiering in SXSW’s Documentary Spotlight section, debuting director Chris Kasick considers his voluble, no-filter subject—Emily Nestor of the Mile Marker 181 podcast—from all of these angles while also producing a work that is something of a moral reckoning for the popular audio genre. In 2011, Jaleayah Davis, a 20-year old Ohio woman, died in a horrible drunk-driving accident, her head severed from her body. Or was it murder? And were her friends that evening — Katy Nelson, Kristin Bechfold and Freddy Scott — possibly involved?

A young West Virginia woman, Nestor grew up obsessed with Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs as well as true crime shows like Forensic Files. In 2018, with a $400 microphone and a laptop recording program, she launches the multi-season Mile Marker 181, dedicated to “the truth” behind Davis’s death. Soon the show is hailed by Vulture—writes Chanel Dubofsky, “It’s only the second episode, and I’ve already started drawing weird crime-scene diagrams and hypothesizing as to what Kristin was doing with Jaleayah’s keys”—and attracting ubiquitous audio sponsors such as Warby Parker and Away Suitcases, with Nestor a mini-star on the crime convention circuit, where she has a star-struck meet-and-greet with Nancy Grace.

Nestor’s rise and fall (her current Instagram ID’s her as “true crime pariah”) has been well documented on Reddit, but Kasick’s methodical capturing of her trajectory, and particularly the timeline of her differing public and private views, is queasily riveting. The obsessional Nestor seems always eager to fill whatever size memory card Kasick is able to put in his camera, with the director occasionally lobbing off-screen questions a la Errol Morris (Kasick has worked for the veteran documentarian) that nudge his subject to some degree of ethical introspection—a line of inquiry that Kasick comes to realize he must also address as well. As for Nestor, that introspection leads to the truth of her podcast’s final episode, a mic drop that finally owns up to the collateral damage her audio enthusiasm has left in its wake.

Below, in an interview that has been edited for length and clarity, Kasick discusses how Nestor became the subject of his first documentary, how and why he became filmmaker-as-confidante, and what questions his film poses to the broader true crime community.

Filmmaker: Could you begin by telling me how you came across Emily Nestor and then what made you decide to make her story your debut film? I’ll confess to having at one point been something of a true crime fan but who has, in recent years, become much less interested in the genre. In other words, I completely missed this podcast and the drama around it when it came out.

Kasick: It was 2018, and one of my producers, Fabiola Washburn, who works with Errol Morris, as I and [DP and producer] Jared Washburn still do too, is into true crime. Like you, I was into true crime and now it’s just so saturated — everything feels like a magazine article, not a film. Fabiola [told me] about this story, and I had lived in the mid-Ohio Valley and gone to college at Ohio University. So I knew the area, the people, the locations. I listened to about half the first season of the podcast, and [Emily] was a character, a unique voice, I had not heard before. [The podcast] was messy, sloppy, promoting a murder theory, and there was a lot of rumor. I’m a curious person, so I went to Parkersburg [W. Va]. I think the way to get these things going is not through meetings or phone calls but face to face. I met Emily in early 2019, and she was one of those characters you sort of wait for, someone who is screaming to tell her story. And then as I had started talking to other people and doing research and investigating, I had a lot of questions about the first season of her podcast. I moved to West Virginia, rented a house, and I knew entertainment and fact were going to collide at a certain point. I was all in on this story, and I watched it develop over the course of four years.

Filmmaker: You say the podcast was messy and sloppy. Mile Marker 181’s amateur status in a world of slickly-produced true-crime podcasts like Serial is one of the subjects of the documentary itself. 

Kasick: When I got [to West Virginia] and started doing local research, talking to reporters at the newspaper, there weren’t any. I tried to go to local news and there wasn’t any. It became apparent to me that Emily was filling this local journalism void. And I was like, well, this is a story — this vacuum in the new media landscape where you have these citizen sleuths who are doing their own fact-finding investigations. At first it was a murder [story], but as it evolved, it became a real intimate story of conflict. My favorite movies are movies that feel intimate and are about smaller things that have large repercussions, or which echo larger [subjects]. That Emily, who has a voice but is totally untrained, who is someone who went from being a waitress at Buffalo Wings to having an audience of millions while telling facts about a murder case and meeting with the sheriff — well, what is going on? And that became a story.

Filmmaker: You say you went to West Virginia and talked to other people. The film is almost entirely focused on your interviews with Emily and some verite footage of her, with one significant break in the end. Was that formal construction — that you would be following her so closely — your original concept, or did it evolve in the edit because of how completely voluble and revealing she was?

Kasick: It was both. At first it was, we’re telling Emily’s story and her investigation. I had talked to Katy [Nelson], Kristen [Bechfold] and Freddie [Scott] during the process, but they didn’t want to to appear on camera because they thought I was with Emily, and she was railroading them. It wasn’t until Emily put out her conclusion that they chose to speak to me [on camera or audio].

But I was sort of on my own beat on this — talking to people and piecing things together. I had my own researcher and was trying to understand [the case] from my point of view and to try and understand where Emily was coming. We got the police file, which is a 1,000 page document. It is so extensive, and there are all these rabbit holes that even the police went down — red herrings and everything that was just so ripe for conspiracy. 

As a filmmaker, you want to pursue the truth, right? And how do you get that? How do you get this honesty? Somebody once said the highest form of intimacy is truth. And if you’re trying to make an intimate film about a real conflict, it became obvious to me that this was going to be a story of internal conflict, and that conflict was an internal thing of conscience, of telling the truth — doing the right thing when it doesn’t serve you. So I realized early on that everything revolved around my professional relationship with Emily and creating an environment where it felt like we were in this journey together. We were walking this tightrope because she had announced the documentary on her podcast, which is in the film. There was a Facebook forum that was angry, Reddits that were angry, and [people] started coming after the documentary and the podcast. It was a perfect storm. 

Filmmaker: Most of that is not in the film. She does mention the documentary, but it’s a brief mention. Before speaking to you I found those Reddit threads, where people felt she was somehow benefitting from the documentary. Why didn’t you show more of this uproar in the film?

Kasick: It’s always a topic in this age of social media how to dramatize an online world. I thought that the best way to show the pushback that was happening was through [depicting] Emily’s internal struggles. Her pushback against me [illustrated] the larger pressure that she was getting from the outside. And I also wanted to stick to the case. When you start going down these online rabbit holes of rumors and gossip — “Is Emily getting blood money?” and all of that —  how does that manifest into reality? And it manifested through Emily and her putting out in 2019 the final episode of the truth.

Filmmaker: One of the arcs in the film is you, as a filmmaker, coming to grips with what you are making and whether your film is participating in the same kind of “truth vs. entertainment” conflict that you are depicting in Emily’s story. Emily reaches a conclusion about Jaleyah Davis’s death, which you show in the film. Since you had done your own research, did you reach that same conclusion before she did? Were you filming while holding a differing view of the case?

Kasick: No. She was down the road of her investigation and knew before I did. She had been doing the McDonald’s drive, the breaking of the [passenger window] glass, finding the microfilm article, and her conclusions weren’t adding up to murder. She had already committed to the podcast episodes, and the ethics of all of this don’t matter to Spotify. As soon as her podcast became a hit, she didn’t know the rules of engagement. She could have just ended it, and she was struggling with what to do when we were filming. There’s one scene in the film where we had a conversation about it being an accident, and then she went on the Crawlspace podcast and [discussed] her whole murder [theory]. And I was like, do I address this right now? She was struggling with it. We were in her house and we discussed it on camera. How do you talk about it as a murder when you think it’s an accident? She was like, I’m trying to protect myself as a storyteller to get the larger story out. And I’m like, well, what are the ethics of that? I mean, I have worked in the entertainment business, and these are the conversations that are always being had with producers, with everybody, but it’s never really shown. 

In the end, we were trying to make [a film] about the pursuit of truth, and we needed to show how we got there. We have over 500 hours of footage, and the camera becomes part of the truth telling. She was driving towards something that wasn’t accurate at first, and then she course corrected as she was struggling with it, and we were there to capture it. And that was intentional.

Filmmaker: You became a sort of confidant to her.

Kasick: Yeah, people were coming at me, they were coming at her. I’m trying to tell a story while I’m seeing her struggling with telling a story. But I always kept coming back to the Errol Morris stuff, to come back to the truth, the facts. If we stick to them, and in the end can resolve this, that is a topic that can resonate.

Filmmaker: Why do you think Emily kept the story going on for so long? Was it really just because of the popularity of the podcast, the advertisers, etc.? The viewer can make their own assessment from watching the film, but why do you think she didn’t call it off earlier?

Kasick: She said she wanted to prove it. She wanted definite evidence. And then after the timing of the McDonald’s drive was wrong, when the glass wasn’t adding up, when the microfilm article [showed] the family had a history of making false claims, and after the family was coming after her and the [scene with] the grandfather on the road, she finally reached a breaking point. She was coming up with strategies of how to weave out of this gracefully, like a Serial kind of thing. And so there was a gap of months before putting out the last episode. She couldn’t face the family — they were in contact with her, trying to have her put out more episodes, and she no longer believed [the murder theory]. And so she hard-stopped and put out the truth. 

Filmmaker: Did Emily know you did those three interviews with Kristin Bechfold, Katy Nelson and Freddie Scott, which are in the film and which she’s not a part of? 

Kasick: While we were editing, she reached out to those people individually to apologize, and they said they had talked to me. She had actually put me in contact with Katy, who’s on camera. She had reached out to her independently of me to tell her a new ending was going to come and that she was going to course correct this.

Filmmaker: Tell me about your use of score, which I have to say felt almost comic to me from the start. 

Kasick: I like waltzes, and waltzes are defined by peaks and valleys, highs and lows. Waltzs portray three-act structure very well to me. Errol Morris and Kubrick use them a lot, and these peaks and valleys keep it light. It became obvious to me as we were making this that this was sort of a meta film about entertainment and facts, and I felt the score would portray that meta layer. The composer [P. Andrew Willis], who also works with Errol Morris and Philip Glass, and I have worked together on my previous film, and he comes from Appalachia. The score was recorded on a 1990s synthesizer from Radio Shack, [which ties into] the whole idea of analog and Citizen Sleuth.

Filmmaker: Has Emily seen the film?

Kasick: Yes, I showed it to her last week. It wasn’t obvious to her what we were making at the time, and she was moved by it. You know, there’s that Subject documentary out right now, and it’s complicated when you’re making these things — it’s a complicated relationship.

Filmmaker: From, again, reading Reddit, and looking at her Instagram, she’s moved on. She’s not in the true crime space anymore.

Kasick: Yes, she calls herself [on Instagram] “a true crime pariah.” When she was attending the true crime conventions, she was really in the community. And as this story started unfolding, she was almost divorcing herself from it to tell the truth. She’s removing her tattoos, and she’s talking now about pursuing a career in law enforcement. What’s happened in the last few years has had a profound effect on her. She’s hoping the film lends some kind of insight into the struggle she had putting [the final episode] out there.

Filmmaker: We can be critical of Emily and the amateur nature of her investigation, but reading the positive reviews of her podcast alongside slicker productions in mainstream publications made me realize that the true crime genre has its tropes. Maybe they’re being done by amateurs and maybe they’re being done by professionals, but they’re the same tropes, you know? Has your perspective on this whole industry changed since you finished the film?

Kasick: I feel like the first season of Serial did this thing right. But you start looking at Crime Junkie, My Favorite Murder, and everything Nancy Grace, and it’s like the most sensational stuff. It’s never deep investigation. I don’t think Emily was conscious of formatting or genre when starting this. I think she listened to Serial and was like, “I’m going to start doing this.” [Some podcasters] read some Wikipedia notes and throw out some questions, and that’s what it is. But Emily’s whole approach to it was different — it was this active investigation. 

I felt like this was an important story to get out there for the true crime community, to talk about the collision of fact and entertainment. We have to remember that there’s a truth to all of this because it can start becoming real slippery, and then what’s the fallout? It’s sort of a cautionary tale for people who create and put out content that there are larger consequences, and we should think about and discuss them, and that’s a healthy discussion to have.

(This article’s introduction was adapted and expanded from Filmmaker‘s 2023 SXSW curtain raiser.)