Interview: Pavan Moondi (Writer, Co-Director) & Brian Robertson (Co-Director)

The following interview was conducted by Kevin Scott (Exclaim, Torontoist) for the purposes of this press kit. Please free to re-publish excerpts from this interview, but we please ask that the entire text not be re-published elsewhere.

Kevin Scott [KS]:
What was the inspiration for the script and the characters?

Brian Robertson [BR]:
We had another film that Pavan wrote that we were trying to get financed, and it was a larger scale film, so we were kind of more or less instructed to put together a smaller project first. Pavan and I started talking about a smaller story about a group of actors.

Pavan Moondi [PM]:
Yeah, so the idea was to do something that was more purely character driven and not set in a fancy location, or that was a plot driven story.

The actual genesis of why we decided on actors being the focal point, was that I remember having a drink with a friend of mine who is a filmmaker. He had just put this project together that had just come out, and he was not getting the reaction that he thought it should be getting, or he thought it deserved to get. And it was actually really good – it did deserve to be seen by people. And so I was having this drink with him and we were both kind of struggling, and were just commiserating about how we weren’t really young anymore, and the uncertainty and the frustration. He looked at me and said “when is this going to happen?”. That line stuck with me, it’s actually in the film – because it sums up this idea of not having any control. You’re just totally passive, where you’re at the mercy of something happening for you, which is the way it is a lot of the time when you work in film.

So that was the idea, but we decided on making it about actors because that’s who are most at the mercy of other people’s control. I came up with the idea to follow three actors. So there was Edith, the Clare character who was a completely different character, and there was another character who is still in the film but has been completely minimized. It was these three characters, and I was starting to outline it, and the further we got into it, it became clear that Edith had enough going on to sustain a feature on her own.

BR:
Yeah, she just became the most interesting one of the three. And I think [to Pavan] you kind of got fairly far along with the first draft with the three of them, and it just wasn’t working out, bouncing back and forth between these three, so we chose to focus on Edith and it came together pretty quickly.

PM:
Yeah, it was written relatively quickly. The first draft was about three weeks, and then it was just writing draft after draft here and there for six or seven months. I don’t write every day or anything.

BR:
There are some things in the film that we had dealt with, and of course like Pavan mentioned the metaphor for not being in control – at that time, we had this other script that people were interested in, this other film, but it was too big. No one wanted to take a chance on it, so it felt like we were just in this weird limbo where we were just waiting. This perpetual waiting game, and that’s mostly filmmaking. You’re a filmmaker but even if it’s going really well you’re only shooting for a month out of the year.

PM:
And I think the early drafts of the script were maybe more directly critical of the film industry.

BR:
Yeah, the original story was about three people who were in the industry, and it became just really obvious that it was just becoming too insider and we didn’t want to make an insider movie.

PM:
And the trajectory of the story at that point was just Edith getting screwed over by people who are jumping at the chance to manipulate her, which we still have kept some elements of, with the Derek Neville character, but it was a lot of that. It was five of those scenarios all happening. Repeatedly going in that direction.

It wasn’t terrible but it wasn’t really human. The Edith character was at that point just a pawn to communicate this point. It would have felt good while we were making it, like we were making some bold statement because we’ve been fucked around a little bit before, but we would have regretted it. You don’t want to work on that film for two years of your life.

And so I re-wrote the script trying to draw inspiration, trying to look inward and focus on those things that are deep down inside everyone – fear, uncertainty, jealousy, insecurity – and bring those to Edith. To make her more vulnerable. People might not like relating to her because those feelings are ‘bad’ feelings, and vulnerability is not a celebrated thing. It’s considered a sign of weakness. But I think the reality is that Edith is like a lot of other people, she’s just dealing with a lot of stress and frustration that has brought those feelings closer to the surface, and they’re starting to impact her actions.

KS:
What was the casting process like?

PM:
So we finished the script, and we were trying to find someone to play Edith for like, [to Brian] five or six months?

BR:
Yeah we had a lot of the smaller roles already filled in our mind. We knew that we wanted to work with Adam [Gurfinkel] in some capacity; he plays Ben…

PM:
And we knew we wanted to work with Nick [Flanagan]…

BR:
Right, we had written Nick into the film, and we knew that we wanted to work with our friend Noah who plays “Christian”. We wanted to work with Leah Wildman (Clare). For Edith we were trying to come up with a non-actor, who had the attitude and the charisma that was appropriate for the character, because the character is so unlikeable on the page, we needed to cast someone who was really, really likeable to conflict the audience. Someone with a real sweetness…

PM:
We had posted an ad, we had posted casting ads in all the usual places and had like 500 submissions that were just all terrible for this. We just didn’t see it.

BR:
So part of it was having the right look. Like part of it was Pavan and I going through these images of these people and we just didn’t see our character there.

PM:
And I think because of the way we’re working we’re trying to get someone that will bring their own personality to the character and so the most important thing is that they really have a personality. Someone with a really interesting, curious personality is a very rare thing, especially among actors. Leah is probably the most curious person I’ve ever met.

BR:
With our previous project, the lead actor was a comedian named David Dineen-Porter who had only acted a little bit before in things that I hadn’t seen, and his main thing is stand-up comedy, so we took a chance on him because he was a performative person who is comfortable standing up in front of people and performing. David was really comfortable being the centre of attention in a room full of people he didn’t know, and so that was something we were talking about for a while. Casting a non-actor who was comfortable in their skin, which is why we’re drawn to musicians and comedians.

PM:
You know they’re at least going to have some type of personality that they’re going to bring to the table, which you can use to kind of add depth to the characters.

In terms of how we actually cast Leah, we were at the Mongrel Media TIFF party last year, so a little over a year ago, and it was after months of not finding anyone. And we were just seriously considering moving on to a different project because a project like this is so dependent on the lead actress that there’s no point in doing it if they’re not right for the role. Her band July Talk was performing at that party, and it was within a few seconds into their set that we made our decision.

BR:
I didn’t really know about July Talk at that point. I hadn’t heard their music, but we saw Leah on the stage, and she brings this chaotic energy with her persona on stage, which I would say more or less is who she is, but it’s a little more extreme.

PM:
Yeah, on stage it’s a dialed up version of her personality.

BR:
And so she’s on stage pouring beer on Peter [bandmate and Diamond Tongues cinematographer], and she’s whipping a beer-soaked jacket around…

PM:
She climbed up onto a speaker and went into the crowd and was laying on the floor in front of us. We took a picture.

BR:
Yeah we got that picture. And I mean when you’re planning a film, and trying to cast, or thinking about casting, it’s kind of like the only thing you think, or talk about. You see a person on the street and it’s just “oh that person could work, go talk to them”. The only thing Pavan and I were literally talking about at that time was film related stuff. Casting just always kept coming up. So when we saw July Talk perform at that party, it was as soon as we saw her, it was like “she’s Edith”.

PM:
In terms of the casting process, I think we just asked her to do it. We didn’t get a chance to talk to her at that party I don’t think. We talked to Peter briefly that night – we might’ve hired him to shoot the film on the spot – but we didn’t see her after the set and we kind of thought like “oh we fucked up, that was our chance to pitch her, we might never see her again”

BR:
It turns out we knew a couple people at that party who knew her, and they just told us that Leah is the type of person who is so open to that kind of stuff, and that next time we see her we should just approach her.

PM:
Right and so the next night we were at some other TIFF party and they happened to be performing there as well, and we didn’t even know until we got there and then, I just went up to her and asked her to do it. It was super loud and chaotic and she was about go on stage. “Hey I need you to act in this movie!” And she was like “Sure!”

BR:
Literally walking onto the stage, like “yeah of course”…

PM:
She said “sure”, then hugged me, and walked away and right onto the stage in front of hundreds of screaming people. That was the extent of the casting process. There was no audition. So we took a huge risk, just because that character is in every scene, that if she was a bad actor it would have sunk the whole project. But sometimes you just know when you look at someone…that there’s something there and it’s just going to work. I think with her, and with Peter, there was an immediate feeling that just told us this was right. We lucked out that they’re both great people.

BR:
The four of us definitely got into a groove. There was a weird sort of compatibility and we became immediately really comfortable around each other. The only person we auditioned was Adam (Ben), which is funny because we’ve actually worked with him before. We were going to cast another local comedian in the Ben role, and Adam was going to be in a smaller part, but Pavan really pushed for him taking that Ben role once the comedian dropped out.

PM:
It was an informal audition that we filmed in my basement. It was more of a screen test to prove to the producers that he could fit the part.

BR:
Yeah, he did a great job. He came in and nailed it and it was very obvious he was the right guy. Even though it was a last minute thing, and most of our casting was completely at the last minute, it seemingly always has a way of working out.

PM:
Yeah I don’t think anyone else was auditioned at any point. Nobody that got a part in the film. I don’t like auditions anyway. Usually if we meet someone in a weird or interesting way, I’m more inclined to want to work with them. Maybe it’s for the sake of having a good story – but I cast Brendan Hobin (Jason) at a house party at 5am like a week before filming. I thought he had a good voice and offered him the part – and then he told me he actually had a background in music and comedy, which kind of fit what we’re doing perfectly.

BR:
And for a lot of small roles we just always had someone in mind. And luckily almost everyone we asked was open to working with us.

KS:
How worried were you casting someone who had never acted before? Was that a concern at all?

PM:
I don’t think so. This was a weird film because once we cast Leah, I was never really worried with any aspect creatively on the film, at any point. At least not in terms of actors’ performances. Some actors needed to be directed differently but everyone adapted very well. In terms of Leah, we shot a little 8-minute demo four months before the shoot to help us raise financing. And she just did such a great job carrying it, and I think she really understood the voice that the script was written with. By the end of the shoot she required very little direction and when she was unsure about something, we had developed a pretty good shorthand based in just complete bluntness.

BR:
It’s one of those things where, I didn’t know Leah; I knew we didn’t have much time shooting the film, and it’s something you obviously think about, but Peter came on pretty quickly as our cinematographer, and just the relationship that they had going into the film, being so close, that kind of wiped away any concerns I had. I knew that having him on set, working so closely with us was going to make her feel really comfortable right off the bat. Even on day one it just became very obvious that it was going to be smooth sailing with her.

PM:
And I think that when we’re working it’s very rare for us to have an actor who is not right for the part because we’ll adapt the part to the actor to make it work. So it’s very rare for us to have an actor who just doesn’t work.

BR:
We figured out on other projects that if the dialogue is not working for that specific person, we’ll re-tool it so it does sound genuine and natural coming from them. But that didn’t happen that often either.

KS:
You’re figuring out locations for shooting. There’s specific parts of the city? Specific locations you had in mind for shooting scenes already?

PM:
Well, we talked with Pete about that a lot.

BR:
We sort of felt like this story was taking place more or less on the west end of Toronto, and Peter’s idea was that we would incorporate the downtown area into the film where we could. When she’s walking around, the audition sequences, a lot of the commute stuff would be taking place in the downtown core of Toronto. I think there’s a nice balance there.

PM:
Yeah they live and hang out in the west end, but her professional life is all happening downtown. And it’s skyscrapers and crowded streets. So yeah, all the auditions take place pretty close to where we are now (Front St & Spadina).

KS:
And I guess with Peter, what did you talk about in terms of the look of the film? What kind of discussions did you have with Peter about that?

PM:
Well, initially there was very little talk about how we were going to shoot it. There was just no time since he was on tour.

BR:
Well we knew that we were going to shoot two cameras at the same time, and we knew that we were going to be shooting in natural light or lit rooms.

PM:
So I think when we first met with Peter we were really intent on having a really slick, professional looking production, and we emphasized things to be very locked down and lit well, and to look like a “real” film. We did that for a day, and we felt that it was just negatively affecting the performances. It all felt very…

BR:
Stilted…

PM:
Yeah and it didn’t look like a million dollar film, it looked like a film that was trying to look like a million dollar film. We just didn’t have the tools. And so after one day we talked to Peter about going to a style that we’ve used before, which is more of a frenetic, handheld, scrappy style. But also maybe mixing in some static shots when Edith is alone, but when characters are in a scene, to allow them to move around and not having to worry about marks. Kind of like the Friday Night Lights style. And so, we ended up re-shooting I think most of what we did on that first day, or it got cut out.

BR:
We re-shot one big scene and the rest was left out. There was an energy we were going for that we weren’t capturing so we figured we should get the cameras up off the sticks and start moving around and start following action. We have a lot of moving around, and cameras following them and if there’s people talking we started using one camera to move back and forth rather than two cameras locked down.

PM:
It’s not necessarily as slick or expensive-looking, but it’s more alive for sure, and it’s wilder. I think it somehow makes it easier to watch. It’s less boring and it just fits the material better.

BR:
And it allows us to work with a smaller crew. Which is key. Aside from days where we had extras, it was mostly a really small crew of people zipping around in Peter’s van. It was maybe 6-10 of us for the most part.

PM:
It was just really small and allowed us to build a trust between everyone where you didn’t feel any pressure, I don’t think. I felt pressure when we were raising money and I felt pressure in post-production as the editor, but I felt no pressure while we were shooting. Which is actually ridiculous because we had a lot riding on this and we had so much to shoot in so little time. Feeling under pressure would be the natural reaction. But it was just so relaxed and so much fun.

But there was no exterior pressure of it feeling like a ‘movie’. I didn’t want anyone to feel like we were making a movie. Sometimes people get really, like pleased with themselves during the process and it can be good for morale in the moment “oh yeah! we’re doing this, we’re making a movie!” but I think it just ends up adding all this unneeded pressure by enforcing this idea that “what we’re all doing here is so big and great. Look how many people are on set. Look how many monitors we have”. So it was just very relaxed and laid back and a very minimal set. There were no monitors, there’s no makeup artists, there’s no camera assistants, there’s not really any PA’s on set. Everyone who’s there has to work harder, but everyone’s tighter knit and more willing to work hard and rough-it because they like each other and believe in what we’re doing together.

KS:
Usually when you have two people who are directing it’s usually a brother pairing, or something like that. You’re directing as a duo, I think that’s kind of unique. What were the specific advantages or challenges you went through working together as directors?

PM:
Well, I think we decided to direct it together when we were developing the story because at the time we were working at the same place – we were having lunch together a lot, and we would talk about what we wanted to do, general ideas for the film. And so at that point we had already started directing the film together. A lot of the directing happens before you start shooting.

BR:
And also after for sure. You finish principal photography and you’re working together for months following.

PM:
And on the set our general rule was that we would try not to disagree with each other in front of anyone [laughs], so it didn’t create any strife, but we all became so comfortable around each other that I think we didn’t end up sticking with this – we had succeeded at creating an environment where everyone could say exactly what they were thinking without anyone being offended.

But we thought the best way to do things would be to kind of divide duties, and then to kind of have veto power over things if necessary. Brian was mostly working with Pete on the look of the film. We don’t have a set decorator or a location scout, so Brian is finding the locations, and setting the frame with Peter and I’m focused mainly on the actors and working with Leah, but if there’s something that I don’t like the look of then I can tell Brian “oh this doesn’t look right”, and if he doesn’t feel good about a line reading, he can tell me “no you should try it differently”. But it’s kind of a segmented, delegated thing.

BR:
It’s a nice system. It’s good to have this support system. But in terms of challenges, I think the shoot itself was more or less smooth sailing. I’d say what comes after the shoot is probably the biggest challenge for us. At the end of the day Pavan and I have somewhat different sensibilities, but for the most part they’re in line, so it’s mainly just being open enough to listen to what Pavan has to say about where to take a certain scene, or how it should be edited. There’s a lot of discussion that we have in that respect.

PM:
Post is the hardest part of the process. It’s the part I like the least, because it’s also the longest part of the process.

BR:
It’s not necessarily a singular vision and sometimes it’s difficult when you’re really adamant about the way something should look and someone else doesn’t see it that way, but for the most part that’s fine too. Pavan edited the film – it would have been great if we had an office, and we’re also working at other full-time jobs and so we’re apart during this process.

PM:
But also with “brother teams” as co-directors, I think we’re not a directing team in that sense. We’re going to direct separately, and then we may direct together again. Brian’s going to do his own thing, and maybe I’ll produce that, and I’m going to do something on my own and Brian will produce that, and maybe two films from now we might team up again. We’ll still be on each other’s sets helping each other out but it depends on the content, it depends on the story we want to tell.

I think it’s better that way because if we were just tied to each other for every project we do than I think it would cause more strife because we’re married to each other for each of those projects whereas now we can do what’s best for each film. If it makes sense that we both have input on a specific film, then it makes sense to direct it together, but if its something that I’ve thought about on my own or already developed, it doesn’t make sense to now say “Ok Brian, block off two years of your life, we have to make this film now”

KS:
What were the more memorable days when you were shooting? Good or bad.

BR:
I can’t really remember any bad days. We do this thing where after shooting for 12 hours or so into the evening, afterwards everyone has all this pent up energy and we’d go out and maintain this camaraderie with our cast and party together – and some mornings were a little rough. The George Stroumboulopoulos show [ed. note: A popular Canadian talk show that appears in the film] was amazing. That was a really great day that happened early on in the production and was pretty up in the air for a while. So being able to lock that in was amazing for the morale for everybody.

PM:
Strombo was memorable for sure but that was also the most nerve-racking and horrible experience, and yet exciting.

BR:
It was amazing but we had no control over it.

PM:
It was the one part of the film that we had no control over. We knew were allowed to have two takes to do this, and I just remember, it was the four of us who went over to the CBC- me, Brian, Leah and Sarah (Haywood, Producer); we went in there and it was just very official, they were giving her the whole treatment as if she was a guest on the show. We were in the greenroom waiting and just started drinking to calm our nerves. I remember just standing off to the side behind a monitor and looking at Leah – and she was so nervous. I felt like I was going to throw up. She went out there and it went pretty well.

BR:
It went really well. They gave us those two takes and said “after this second take, Geroge is packing it up – he’s done”. So she went out there and she did a really good job, they reset, and she went back out there and did it again, and I think we ended up using the second take. On the way to the Strombo show that day, we were sort of joking around about possible things to say to George as Edith – and Pavan told her to ask George out for a drink.. [laughs]

PM:
Well, alright hang on. We were in the green room and I could feel the tension…

BR:
She was really nervous.

PM:
She was really nervous and I could feel the tension in the room and I was joking around to keep it light, and so I was suggesting all these insane things that I never thought she would actually say – well maybe I thought a little bit that she might say them. So I was like, “Oh you should apologize to him for his show being cancelled”, and “you should act like he was hitting on you before the show”…

BR:
Yeah “like Edith is so much better than him, and she doesn’t even really want to be there…”

PM:
“Yeah she’s too good for this”. And that part I think was true to the character and we actually did need that dynamic for this to work and be worth the trouble. And Leah was laughing, and I thought that she got that I was joking about some of the specific things I was saying, which she didn’t. Which is actually what’s great about Leah, is that she fully committed to this film. If we asked her to do something, no matter how embarrassing or uncomfortable or scary the results would be, she would just do it.

BR:
So she goes out there and it’s the first take, and she does it really well. And it was fine, and she came back and we said something like “that was great and we don’t really know what else to do here, but give us something else, something wild”. She had the lines that she memorized, she went out there and delivered a bunch of lines that Pavan had given her and then uh…

PM:
You could hear some groans from the audience.

BR:
A groan from the audience and then just instant tension from the execs, who were, because it was the second last show ever there were a lot of executives out there on the floor. It felt like the last show that George was ever doing.

PM:
It was the second last.

BR:
Yeah. And so it was just like, “oh great.” Leah came back and we were kind of immediately told they were going to hang onto our footage, and that it was very inappropriate.

PM:
There was just a lot of tension. I think we were assuming that they were really angry about it, but then when things worked out, we got the hard drive and everything was fine. I think it was a slight annoyance to them, but it wasn’t as big of a deal as we thought and it will never see the light of day.

BR:
Also at Strombo, Leah met Laura Jane Grace from Against Me! And we met her in the greenroom and she was like like “who are you guys and what are you doing? What is this?”. We explained to her what the scene was, and she offered to come out and make a cameo in the film while she was in town. So the next day we’re shooting at Cherry Cola’s…

PM:
At six in the morning…

BR:
At six am, and Leah had just suggested that Laura make a little cameo, not thinking she would actually show up that early. No one was actually expecting it.

PM:
And she was one of the first ones there. I think some of the crew was actually late that morning and we had no gear. So Laura Jane Grace is sitting down with me wondering what the hell is going on, watching me and three other people just sitting in an empty bar with no film equipment. While I casually eat a breakfast sandwich.

BR:
So we shot for maybe four or five hours at this bar – and Laura Jane Grace was playing the bartender, pouring Leah whiskey and it was seven thirty am and it was just ridiculous. Real whiskey.

PM:
Yeah that was memorable, and I think probably the improv class was the other memorable part, which was we basically had this idea to have this scene, maybe a five minute scene where Edith is in an improv class.

In every version of the script it just said “this scene will be improvised”. So there was no actual direction for the scene. And I think the idea that we had was that it would just be Edith trying very hard but doing very poorly in the improv class. And so we got an actual improv class, who had no idea what was going on – they didn’t even know what this project was. And we just told them we wanted to film an improv class and we would have a new student there who we were doing a documentary-style scene around.

And so we gave Leah some ideas of things to do, and we told her we were not going to interrupt. Like we were never going to call cut, we were just going to film the whole class, and we were going to be sitting in the corner, and we would just take what we could get and we’d just try and find five good minutes in it in the editing. And so it was a forty-five minute take, where we never interfered, and it was just the most awkward and uncomfortable forty-five minutes.

BR:
No, it was fine – well, they were game and it was actually quite nice. They did a really good job and they were trying really hard to include her but Pavan’s direction to Leah was “be disruptive”. And so she came in and was just…

PM:
She was trying to give us a range of material, so it was “be disruptive and full of yourself, but also give us a range because we need to find pieces”. But she spent the whole time being disruptive. And just, laying on the floor, and talking into a fan…

BR:
It was really over the top. And I was losing it.

PM:
The improv performers were worried this was a prank on them. They used fake names, I think. And so there was all this tension in the room when things really went south, and you [to Brian] were so pissed… texting me, like “what is this?!” “This is unusable”.

BR:
Because it was unusable! It didn’t fit at all with what we had in mind, and so we were there for maybe thirty-five minutes, and we had ten minutes left and we just pulled her aside and said “you need to take this in a different direction”…

PM:
“Try now, at least try something”. And we took a break, we took a five minute break and we let Leah break character and we told Peter and Abe our camera operator to just film them secretly during the break. And so we had all this footage that ended up being used in the film which is just Leah being Leah, hanging out with these performers.

When it came time to edit the film, I didn’t even want to look at that footage, like it was so daunting – so we cut the whole film together without that scene, just thinking I would slot it in somewhere – and when we were watching the ending, it was the same ending we have now but it felt light, like it needed something else that needed to be in that montage, and so we decided to try looking at that improv footage and seeing if we can slot it in in the ending, and it kind of ended up working out perfectly.

KS:
I might as well ask, how did that Strombo thing come about? How did you put that together?

BR:
It actually wasn’t written into the script until quite a ways into developing the film. George is a really personable guy, and we kept running into him and he’s always so nice. I think one night we just talked about seeing if George was game. Our producer Sarah Haywood, she knows everyone, was friends with one of the producers on the show and knew George. She really worked hard on it and made it happen.

PM:
Her friend, the producer of George’s show, Catherine Stockhausen is actually in the film and plays Edith’s manager and was cast independently of this. Sarah brought her to us when we were in a jam and she worked out great. We had already cast her, she was already in the film and then Sarah asked her if she would help us set this up and George was down to do it. He’s just super super nice. It was really great of them to do that for us and really elevate what is in reality a very tiny little film.

BR:
Yeah, it came together pretty quickly. Like I said George is really awesome and once he found out about it he was totally game. And Sarah is definitely a very persuasive producer. She was the right person to have on putting that one together.

KS:
When you’re on set, you’re using a lot of improv, but how do you go about making a set that’s conducive to that?

PM:
I think we talked about that to some degree already which is keeping it as small as possible, only having people there who are absolutely essential to the needs of the production. Trying to have a consistent crew there all the time…

BR:
Shooting two cameras simultaneously, and not having to stop mid-take and reset very often. Letting people play out these conversations and shooting them in their entirety, and letting them loop back and doing the whole thing again. In the film, sometimes it’s hard to notice, but a lot of the time it’s just one take we’re using. We’re cutting between two cameras, but it’s just one take.

PM:
So it looks like we’ve cut it together..

BR:
It looks like we’ve cut it together but it’s usually just one natural conversation. We’ll be shooting the scene and capturing the conversation and if we don’t feel like we have it yet we’ll just run it again and again.

PM:
We don’t really call cut [mid-take] that often, we’ll just let it play out and just see it to its natural end and just do it all over again and hope that we get it in one of those takes. If we have to cut it together we’ll cut it together.

BR:
Generally it works almost all of the time. We shoot on average maybe six to ten takes.

PM:
And like we said, letting people bring their own personality to the role. So what they’re doing is very rarely wrong for the character because they have agency to help develop that character. For the major parts, they end up knowing the characters as well I do.

BR:
Sometimes it’s nice having liquor on the set [laughs]. I joke but it does actually help. At Cherry Cola’s Laura Jane Grace was pouring shots of whiskey for Edith, and Edith was drinking them. Things tend to get a little bit looser and more natural…

PM:
Yeah after we shot that scene we had to get something from my apartment for the next scene and Leah threw up in my bathroom [laughs]. At eleven o’clock in the morning. You can’t do that with union actors, I don’t think.

KS:
Is part of that allowing the actors to improvise? I think that Leah was talking about having outlines of scenes, or hitting different beats.

PM:
Yeah it’s hitting different beats. So there’s a full script, not an outline. We try it on the page, and if it’s not really working well, we’ll identify what beats we need to hit, whether it’s for the story, to move the story forward, or if it’s just a specific line I definitely want to be used. We’ll make sure we adhere to those specific points, and we’ll have our actors fill in the blanks for everything else. But we did more of that for Nick and Edith’s scenes for sure, than anybody else’s scenes with Edith. The rest was maybe ninety percent scripted, but the Nick and Edith scenes were closer to sixty percent scripted, but I think that helps for sure.

BR:
And that’s obviously because Nick is a comedian and he’s really good at understanding the beats of the scene and just going off the top and kind of changing his lines around but still ending up at the same spot at the end. It was fun working with Nick because he gave us so much good material. He would do a take and you would want him to say that same joke again, and he would do it again and say something completely different but even funnier.

PM:
And each take is kind of building on the take before it. Mostly our best takes that we’d always use are the last or second last take. Because the later takes are just taking the good parts of the take before and we’re asking them to incorporate all these elements and it gets to a point where we know that it’s good enough to use and we don’t bother doing it anymore beyond that. Maybe a safety.

KS:
I liked that description of Harry Dean Stanton.

BR:
Yeah that was one of the things, he actually said a different line right before that – he said something about “Harry Dean Stanton is a rail road man” – and I was dying, and I asked him to do it again and he ended up saying Harry Dean Stanton is “an old man, who is kind of gross”….

KS:
“But he gets work”.

BR:
Yeah “but he gets work. You probably don’t know who that is”…

KS:
You talked about post-production being the most painful process; how does that work for you guys? Do you show the work to Brian consistently kind of?

PM:
I’m uploading stuff or Brian’s coming over.

BR:
Almost daily. At the time Pavan was more free than I was, so he was spending full days editing the picture, he actually cut the picture together rather quickly.

PM:
I was planning on cutting the picture together over three months, but once I started I couldn’t stop. I had something pretty close to what we ended up with cut together after like three weeks.

BR:
It’s nice to be able to have something to show people as soon as possible. Especially our investors, Brendan (Canning), Sarah (Haywood), Ari (Lantos), Dan (Bekerman), Jason (Charters) and Liam (Romalis). We cut together a little reel right after the shoot to let them exhale a little bit. Let them know we didn’t throw away their money anything. But yeah we have a nice back and forth.

PM:
There’s so many different elements you have to worry about and you have to, like we said about the production, we like keeping it small and only having like ten people work on the film during the shoot. But when you’re in post it’s unavoidable, you need like thirty people working on the film – taking care of sound, and you need people working on the color, and the visual effects and the titles, and you need people to be in agreement, to some degree, about the best edit of the film, and which scenes should be shorter, and which takes are the best takes. And that can be tough sometimes.

With the film I think I really learned the difference between collaboration and compromise. I don’t mind receiving or taking notes, but I want those notes to really be justified and ignite a conversation. Collaboration takes things to new and interesting places; compromise keeps people happy but can hurt the film. So we were careful about the notes we took and we were lucky to have the final say in the edit, but we really got a lot of good notes both from our producers and from our filmmaker friends, and it impacted the scenes that we went out and added to the film later. The pickup scenes made the whole thing a lot stronger.

BR:
And with music cues, especially with this film there’s a significant amount of music montages. Does this music work, does it not? Is this montage right?…

PM:
You’re basically rewriting the film in the edit, so the writing isn’t really done when the script is done, because we have a lot of different material that we film. So you have to rewrite the film again and because the script had parts that, a lot of parts have changed, like the ending has changed from the script, in the sense that that improv stuff was never meant to be used in the end, but it’s something that came up in the edit.

But getting to that point and coming up with those ideas usually comes after a hundred hours of banging your head against the wall trying to figure out why something isn’t working. If you have the solution, you can go out and shoot more, which we did. We shot scenes which we felt we needed to kind of iron out the arc of the character, and luckily on this film, even though Peter and Leah were on tour, they’re based in Toronto so we have the ability to go out and shoot more.

Before we started shooting I was very careful to try to get everything during principal photography because I didn’t like the idea of having to do pickups. I thought we had it all. But Peter gets a lot of credit for really kind of selling me on the idea of cutting the film together and then seeing what it still needed and then going out and getting it.

I think he learned that when he worked on The Dirties, that you can’t be afraid to just keep shooting until you get it right. Those guys kind of do that to the Nth degree but it was something I’m really glad we built into our approach that I hadn’t really thought about. And it was nice to get a break from post-production, which can be very lonely and isolating and a real downer after all of the fun during the shoot. To be able to go out and meet back up with all these people that you love and do it again. It re-invigorated me for sure.

BR:
I’m also fascinated with the post-production process. The film was sound mixed at Deluxe, and we had this team of people working around the clock with the sound edit and mix. It was really nice to have the opportunity to be working with people who have been working on mixing films for twenty-five years.

PM:
It added a lot to the film. We’re doing it the right way versus just doing it all ourselves in our apartments.

BR:
It helps things feel more “real” and can be a bit of a boost when you need it, thinking about this big team of people working on something you created. But more importantly, it really does make a big difference. The quality of the work we had done for us at Alter Ego Post and Deluxe was just great. They hit a home run.