There has been much chatter over the past couple of years or so in magazines, at film festival panels and in the homes and workplaces of emerging filmmakers about that trickiest of tasks, monetizing a short film. How do you do it? As someone who has made several short films over the past few years and who will soon embark upon another, it is a question that constantly repeats itself, usually around the time I'm settling into bed. When I emerge the next day, largely sleepless, I still don't have the answer.If a short film has little to no commercial value, than why spend your money (or some clueless investors) on one? It seems that unless your working toward a degree or have been graced with institutional money, you might as well expend all your energies making a shoestring feature instead of the red headed stepchild of the motion picture business.
Yet, short filmmakers consistently prove me wrong. For in the short film format, perhaps because of its inaccessibility to the marketplace, filmmakers can take the types of risks that even the most formally daring feature films often can't take. How refreshing it is to see an ambitious short film, maybe the type that doesn't easily lend itself to festival programming, but that is undeniably reaching to say or be something new and relevant.
Commissioned by Little Minx, a division of Ridley Scott's RSA, five directors, some you may have heard of (veteran DP/music video director Malik Hassan Sayeed) and several promising newcomers whom you may have not (Josh Miller, Philip Van, Chris Nelson) were asked to make interconnected short films a la the French parlor game Exquisite Corpse. The results are bracing, provovcative, extremely odd and definitely worth a look.
I had the chance to chat via email with four of the Exquisite Corpse directors to talk about there backgrounds, working styles, future ambitions and just what makes this unique project compelling.
Josh Miller, WITHOUT MISSING A BEAT SHE TURNS AND ASKS, "WAFFLES FOR BREAKFAST?"
CEC: Tell us a little bit your background in filmmaking, how you got involved with Little Minx and the Exquisite Corpse project in particular?JM: I don’t have a formal film school background. I studied Journalism, and moved to New York from California to became a writer and creative director in advertising. I actually got my first job as a copywriter/chauffeur -- long story involving endless rolls of toilet paper and a rubber stamp that said, ”Josh Miller, a copywriter willing to start at the bottom.”
Production was always best part of the job for me. And I was definitely a pain in the ass agency creative type who was always breathing down the director’s neck, looking through the lens, sponging and asking questions. I always paid really close attention, and still do, to shooting boards.
When I bought my first Bolex, I started making little stop action movies and absurdly crude music videos with surveillance cameras, and then of course, spec commercials of my own. I ultimately I got a few commercial projects that I was able to both write and direct, and when I built a reel, there were only one or two production companies I was interested in. I was a little afraid of getting lost at a larger production company, so Little Minx was perfect. It’s a smaller boutique, but it’s tied to RSA Films, one of the best, most well respected production companies around.
The Ex Corpse was all Rhea’s brainchild. We’re just lucky participants. I can’t even imagine what she had to deal with, working with 5 or 6 of us directors simultaneously, and putting the whole thing together.
CEC: When making a work that is intimately connected to the autonomous works of others, how does that change your approach as a filmmaker?
JM: For selfish reasons, I’m sure all the directors wanted to make films that would stand alone. Myself included. But the thought of loosely tying them together was really appealing. We all have such different sensibilities, so I was actually looking forward to seeing how disparate the films would be.
The page that was 99% blank, and that’s what made it challenging. But I also liked the idea of stumping, or trying to anyway, the next director with my last line, to see how would he or she would integrate the question, “Waffles for Breakfast?” into the beginning. It’s kind of like a game, Do you choose to let the line you’re given set the tone, if even momentarily, or do you try to incorporate it into your story in a creative way. I took Malik’s last line and, instead of screen direction or dialog, I made it into a song, composed by Pull Music in NY, to be heard over the radio of a car speeding by. That car became the Winnebago, which became a major character in the story.
CEC: Do you consider yourself a cinephile? What debt does your filmmaking style owe to other films or filmmakers who have provided some influence?
JM: I’m definitely not a Martin-Scorcese film-historian type with an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema. I can barely remember the name of a movie I saw a month ago. I’ve never been the kind of person that can quote movies. I remember really strong performances, or more so, tones, feelings, shots, or the way a piece of music worked with a particular shot.
Jacques Tati, Terrence Malick and Truffaut are some of my favorite directors. The Thin Red Line and Day For Night are couple films that made me want to direct. And La Haine, by Mathiew Kassovitz. Come to think of it, I patterned the reveal of the Winnebago after the opening shot.
But I’m just as influenced by photographers like William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore. And someone just turned me on to the painter, Robert Bechtle, whose compositions are so contemporary even though they were painted in the 70s. Very cool.
CEC: What are some of the differences between working in the Ad world and the film business?
JM: There’s more on the line when you’re writing and directing your own piece, opposed to getting a script or a semblance of an idea from an agency. If it turns out like shit, you can’t blame it on someone else’s idea.
On a commercial job, the schedule is usually really concise and well thought out. You arrive on the set having done a lot of thinking and you just hope for good performances and that nothing goes wrong. Working on a film feels a little more organic. Even though time was tight, I was able to explore different things with the actors. I was also able to rehearse with them, something that never happens in the commercial world.
CEC: Do you think your films reflect your personality, preoccupations, ideas? What life experiences have informed your skills as a director most?
JM: Yes.
CEC: What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production, especially considering its relationship to the other pieces?
JM: The structure was actually really concise, so I think the story was fairly straightforward to edit. It was finding the nuances of the performances, and the right reactions that was challenging – especially since we were moving so fast. I don’t think I realized how truly ambitious it was until we were actually shooting. Even though it’s just an 8-minute film, there’s quite a bit going on - interiors, exteriors, time passing, flash backs, stunt work. And we shot it all over the course of 2 ¼ days/nights.
I shot the interior driving sequences in which Carl and June are fighting on green screen. A lot of it was shot handheld, and getting the plates to match time was consuming. It was also tough getting the lighting of the interior of the Winnebago to match the horizon during the transition from nighttime to dawn. Absolute Post/NY did an amazing job. For instance, in a few of the best performance scenes inside the Winnie, I used a lighting effect to recreate passing headlights. But it came time to composite the exterior plates, there were no passing cars. I couldn’t believe how easy it was for them to in drop cars headlights.
CEC: What's next for you?
JM: A drink.
Philip Van, AND SHE STARES LONGINGLY AT WHAT SHE HAS LOST
CEC: Tell us a little bit your background in filmmaking, how you got involved with Little Minx and the Exquisite Corpse project in particular?PV: I made narrative short films both through and outside of film school that I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to festivals and win awards with. My manager and head of Little Minx Rhea Scott saw my work and really “got” all of it, rather than just one or two things. She understood my sensibility from an extremely personal standpoint. She’s very French and we just had an immediate kinship.
Coming from a shorts background, I think I have an eye for story structure in unconventional time signatures, which can either be scaled up to feature-size or down to ads. I have less commercial work to my credit than the other directors in the series, and it’s not the world I come from. I’m a storyteller before anything else and I work to tell the best story I can in the time I’m given.
CEC: When making a work that is intimately connected to the autonomous works of others, how does that change your approach as a filmmaker?
PV: I approached it from essentially the same angle I would another project: by thinking about the story I really want to tell, then weighing that against my limitations.
The constraints of the project really didn’t bite into any element of the creative workflow. My idea, while connected to the other works, is complete in and of itself and free from compromise.
I never felt that anything the other guys were doing got in the way. I was actually not allowed to see their stuff, scripts or films, for this reason. I was only given the last line of the script before mine to go off of, and the condition that the idea should relate to a “minx,” whatever that might be.
CEC: Do you consider yourself a cinephile? What debt does your filmmaking style owe to other films or filmmakers who have provided some influence?
PV: I’ve watched films fairly obsessively since I was a kid. 4 or 5 in one sitting. I was that kind of kid. There are only so many fundamental story structures, which we just keep revising and resubmitting, and I think I was hungry to get to them all, in some way.
But now I actually am surprised by how little I turn to conscious references when I’m pre-planning a shoot. I think films are more cohesive when the process of influence is sublimated. When it’s not a little of this and that, but a steady stream that’s for better or worse truly your own. Sure my work is conscious, but in the end it should be more a look at my reptilian brain.
However, to not bitch-out of the question entirely: my influences for this film were pretty wide-ranging: everything from Charles Laughton’s “Night of The Hunter” to original “Twilight Zone” episodes to some very dense German renaissance paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder to the works of Carl Jung. But more than anything art house, I owe respect to the genre-bending sci-fi films of the 80’s. There may not be an overt comparison here, but my love for those films is formally apparent in some way in everything I do.
CEC: Do you think your films reflect your personality, preoccupations, ideas? What life experiences have informed your skills as a director most?
PV: My films are all a reflection of my perspective, for sure. If they weren’t I would stop making them. They’re in some ways a response to early social trauma – I think initial feelings of alienation, great or small, shape the way we cope with the world. I’m not afraid of that reduction. I don’t think it belittles a concept or a theme, because even world issues go back to playground politics, adolescent ethics. There’s how we treat each other, and then there’s the bureaucracy that surrounds that, which we call being an adult.
I grew up multi-culturally. I’m Asian and Greek. As a kid I could weigh western experience against eastern influence. That was a privilege, I later realized. My father drove a cab for 20 years. In a predominantly white school and neighborhood, I was a perennial outsider. I looked different, I liked art and I didn’t play football. When I bought something, a shirt, a pair of shoes, that was my one version of that thing, usually for a while, until I wore it out. I economized differently. I didn’t grow up wasting and I couldn’t really understand it. When your resources are scarce, everything has meaning. I make all my films like this. I don’t waste time, I don’t shoot much coverage. And I only feel like they’re mine when every shot is intended and fits into the meaning of the greater whole.
CEC: What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production, especially considering its relationship to the other pieces?
PV: I paid homage to the other shorts in the conceptualizing phase, but then went out and made the film without harkening back to them. It was important that the film exist both in the series and stand up on its own. So the best thing to do once I knew where it was positioned was to forget about the other films and work towards making this one as good as it could be.
CEC: What's next for you?
PV: A feature script that I wrote, called Darkland just got accepted into the Tribeca Film Insitute, so I’ll be working on that through Tribeca for a spell. It’s a period noir-thriller set in Laos during the fall of Vietnam in the 70’s. I’m also working on proposals for a few spots. My first concern is that a brand can accept and benefit from an original idea before moving forward. If we’re going to put the time in, I want to make sure we have the chance to do something different.
Malik Hassan Sayeed, SHE WALKED CALMLY DISAPPEARING INTO DARKNESS
CEC: Tell us a little bit your background in filmmaking, how you got involved with Little Minx and the Exquisite Corpse project in particular? MHS: I began my career as a cinematographer shooting features, music videos, and commercials. I began directing in 1998 with Little Minx. Since then I have primarily done music videos and commercials. This is the first theatrical project I have done as a director. I got involved with the Exquisite Corpse project when Rhea told me her ideas about the project and asked me to participate.
CEC:When making a work that is intimately connected to the autonomous works of others, how does that change your approach as a filmmaker?
MHS: I don’t think that it changed my approach as a filmmaker more than it kept me focused on the two central ideas, which were the final line of the previous director’s treatment and creating a story with my idea of the little minx as the main theme. What I notice that becomes the challenge in this situation is keeping these ideas at the fore as spontaneity occurs in the creative process.
CEC: Do you consider yourself a cinephile? What debt does your filmmaking style owe to other films or filmmakers who have provided some influence?
MHS: I’m not sure if I am a cinephile, but I do watch a lot of film. Style, form, atmosphere, and mood are very important for me. Like Bresson my intention is to invoke a feeling in the viewer by way of creating atmosphere. For this reason the two filmmakers I am drawn to in terms of the their overall work are Robert Bresson and Stanley Kubrick. Bresson is again important for me in terms of establishing rhythm with picture and sound I am also drawn to naturalism and realism in casting and locations so films like Battle of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo and Salvatore Giuliano by Francesco Rosi are important models. In terms of casting I subscribe to the school of filmmakers who work with non-professional actors. Again Bresson is the model, as well as films like Kes and Sweet Sixteen by Ken Loach, Killer of Sheep and Several Friends by Charles Burnett,
Salaam Bombay by Mira Nair, and most recently the television show The Wire. For this project I was also interested in creating a story with a non-conventional story structure. For that I looked at Godard, Chris Nolan with Momento, and Ozu who I consider to be the master of story construction and architecture.
CEC: What are some of the differences between working in the Ad world and the film business?
MHS: The primary difference between working in the Ad world and working on something like this is the level of autonomy and freedom we’re able to have. When working on commercials there are usually a lot of people involved who’s ideas must also be incorporated in the project. It ceases to become a singular vision, which sometimes works out but most often does not. It was definitely exiting and liberating to work on something that did not have those limitations. Because I have worked on commercials so long this initially became somewhat of a challenge.
Chris Nelson, SHE TURNS BACK AND FACES FORWARD AT PEACE
CEC: Tell us a little bit your background in filmmaking, how you got involved with Little Minx and the Exquisite Corpse project in particular? CN: I've been directing commercials with Little Minx for about two and a half years now. Rhea Scott, the president of the company, approached me with the idea for the shorts and I thought it was a really great idea and fantastic opportunity.
CEC: When making a work that is intimately connected to the autonomous works of others, how does that change your approach as a filmmaker?
CN: In this instance, we actually didn't know what each other were doing. We were given the last line of the previous director's treatment as the starting point for our film. But that was it. So the other films didn't really affect my approach. What I did do is begin my film with images that evoked the last line of the previous director's film, in hopes that there would be a meaningful transition between our films when they were linked together.
CEC: Do you consider yourself a cinephile? What debt does your filmmaking style owe to other films or filmmakers who have provided some influence?
CN: I most certainly love film. I'm really drawn to character driven films and the art of storytelling. And I love humor that comes from real and relatable situations. I've been influenced by a lot of filmmakers for different reasons. I really admire personal filmmakers, like Truffaut and the New Wave directors. I love the way that the best work of Billy Wilder and Mike Nichols seems almost effortless and never pretentious or judgmental. I love how Pedro Almodovar uses color and also straddles the line between realism and absurdity. And I love the tone, texture, and average American settings of Alexander Payne and Todd Solondz. As strange as it may seem, I think this has all come together to influence me in certain ways.
CEC: What are some of the differences between working in the Ad world and the film business?
CN: I'll get back to you on this one when I have a bit more experience in the film business!
CEC: Do you think your films reflect your personality, preoccupations, ideas? What life experiences have informed your skills as a director most?
CN: I definitely think my work reflects my life and I admire directors who bring themselves into their work. I was a child actor and spent much of puberty in strange places, including a daytime soap opera set. So it's probably no major coincidence that I'm really drawn to films with characters in slightly strange settings and odd predicaments. And I love films and stories with characters in search of identities or in some form of identity crisis. I also think my background as an actor has had a big impact in my style of directing and my overall interest in story and character.
CEC: What's next for you?
CN: I'm reading scripts and have a couple projects that I am interested in further developing with producers. I've optioned a book which I am adapting as a feature length script. And I'm also working on developing the story of my short for television.
