Writer, director, and star Mimi Davila first caught my eye in Paula Andrea Gonzalez-Nasser’s astonishing debut The Scout. In that film, Davila plays a location scout working on a film in New York. As she encounters weirdos at different locations and catches up with a more successful friend, Davila plays the role with quiet restraint. Always observing, it’s what makes her so good at her in-movie job, she nails the heartbreak of a job that necessitates transient relationships. It’s a beautiful performance in one of the best films of the year. Finding out she’d written and directed her own short, I had to seek it out.

Shot in gorgeous black-and-white, Pangea is guerrilla, scrappy filmmaking at its finest. A true NYC picture, Davila captures the vibrancy of a city swirling with every identity under the sun and always on the go. Settled into the apartment, the film takes on the best of any two-hander; proto-Cassevetes comes to mind. Davila turns the single location into a microcosm of life itself. Bold and abrasive, Pangea dives into the complicated, thorny aspects of identity, kink, and how they intersect that few films seem interested in dissecting.

Ahead of its NYC premiere courtesy of Rooftop Films, I met up with Mimi to talk about the film, not being for everyone, the need to get your story out there, and so much more.

Brandon Streussnig: You’re premiering your own short a little over a year after The Scout premiered. What’s that been like?

Mimi Davila: It’s making me, first of all, feel really welcomed in New York and like I really made the right decision about being here. It’s also making me realize more and more that my path in this career is one where I’m going to have to constantly advocate for myself. I’m not for everybody. For a long time, especially as an actor, I wanted to be chosen by everyone. I wanted to be validated. Then, with The Scout and my short, I’m realizing, “No, I think my path is me constantly choosing myself over and over again.” Connecting with people like Paula who can really understand my distinct point of view. I’m trying to embrace the fact that I’m not generic. A big part of me wishes I was, but I think the part of me that wishes that is the part of me that’s taking away energy from just going forward and being like, “I’m just not.”

BS: Is that part of what went into finally making your own short? Much of what the short is about is two people being unapologetically themselves with each other.

MD: Yeah. I wanted to make a short for a long time because so much of my self-authored work was with Laura Di Lorenzo. So I was always used to writing and creating with a partner, and that was the bulk of my writing. For a long time I was like, “I really want to write. I really want to make the move and make my debut, my vision singularly.”

BS: Where did the initial story come from? It feels very personal.

MD: It came from a situationship that I had with a guy. He has, I would say, similar identity qualms. He’s Black, but he’s light-skinned, and his dad is Dutch Guyanese. He has two backgrounds, and he grew up being singled out for his talent or artistry. He always felt like maybe he didn’t really fit in anywhere.

I think that’s a beautiful thing about New York: everyone is very upfront, direct, and conscious. Growing up in Miami was similar. Everybody’s very conscious about class, race, and what that is doing in real time in interpersonal relationships, whereas I think LA doesn’t really talk about it as much. New York and Miami are two places where people are constantly having those kinds of conversations.

He kind of became a muse to me because he sees everything through that lens. Everything is racial. Everything is historical. Which can be annoying sometimes, but I’m like, “That’s fascinating.” That’s always top of mind, whether some of that is trauma. It doesn’t matter because it’s valuable. But it was always coming into play with us. So that left me feeling very perplexed that, in today’s age, when we’re kind of all saying, “Oh, we’re all in this together,” Well, that’s not true, actually. When Trump came into office, that became much more back to the forefront of the conversation, of like, “No, there’s still a lot of racism.” I think for a while there, there was kind of a glaze.

BS: There was that naivete around the feeling that we beat it or something.

MD: We “beat it,” but even today in a lot of film and television, I find that when it’s a white person making a project, and there are people of color or diversity, they don’t ever really go into what the actual realities are that still exist today. Those tensions that still exist today, people don’t want to go into them. People just want to say, “Okay, we checked all the boxes. We have all the diversity boxes checked. We’re great.”

I think I’ve just been fascinated by identity my whole life because of my background, and I’ve never felt like I belong anywhere. So that left me for four or five years being like, “How can I articulate these feelings into something?” Because I knew that’s what I wanted my first thing to be about. I was like, “I want to talk about this.” And it was scary because it’s very vulnerable to admit.

With Latinidad, there are Black Latin people, there are white Latin people, but it’s also this place of confusion too. People are like, “I’m not white, I’m Latina.” Or, “I’m not Latina. I am white.” Or, “I’m not Black, I’m Latin.” Everybody in the Latino community is kind of scrambling with that. I wanted to make something that is, in a way, like, “No, I know that even though, for me, I hate being seen as white, I am a white Latina.” And by recognizing that, I’m also not erasing a Black Latino experience. That was a little scary, too, because it made me confront those uncomfortable things, but I wanted to make fun of it, too.

BS: This film lets these characters have conversations about identity without stopping to explain who they are. Was that important to you? To make it feel authentic rather than didactic?

MD: I didn’t think about it that way. I just thought about it as: if there’s something I feel deeply that I want to communicate, and it’s also embarrassing or scary for me, then I know I’m making it for people who feel that way. So I always just thought about it like, “I know who I’m making it for.” For a while, when I didn’t know if it was going to get in anywhere, it was really sad. Because, as I mentioned earlier, I’m obsessed with validation. I was like, “Oh my God, what if I wasn’t right? What if this isn’t communicating and reaching the people and having people feel seen in the way that I thought it would?”

Now that it’s getting out there and some people are responding to it, I’m like, “No, I was right.” All I want to do is make the people feel seen. The people that I’m thinking about. I’m like, “If you feel the way I feel, then I just want you to feel seen.” That’s rewarding. I wanted it to feel kind of universal, but also like, “Oh, there’s a thing here that is for a specific group of people.” If you pick up on it and you get it, you get it. I think that’s the hard thing that, in my journey as a creator, is figuring out: how do you become more universal while still being incredibly specific?

BS: The original story was for you and a man. What made you change the characters to two women?

MD: It was actually the actress herself, Sasha Merci. I was already in pre-production to shoot. For some reason, she was just in my space during that time. Every time that we would be together, a couple of people would just go, “Oh, are you guys doing the short together? Is she the person in your short?” So I was like, “Is this a sign that it needs to be two women?”

Then I started to think about what it means to make it two women. I found that it made me ask a lot more questions. I had just taken this class, and the teacher was like, “You don’t want to have all the answers. You want to always be asking.” So I was like, “All right, I’ve been with this story of the guy and what really happened for so long that I kind of feel like I’m not even really asking anything.”

I think we're all very familiar with a man who’s more guarded or more emotionally unavailable, as opposed to a woman who’s more guarded and more emotionally unavailable. I just thought that was more interesting. Because Sasha’s Dominican, I thought, “Well, now it brings in this whole other layer of Latinidad,” which I found really interesting, too.

In real life, with all my girlfriends, with Sasha literally, they always see me as white. It’s like this thing where it’s, “You’re white,” but they also defend me in front of other people who’ll be like, “Oh, she’s white.” And they’ll be like, “No, no, she’s Cuban.” That is so interesting to me.

BS: Pangea explores the tension between psychology and what happens in the bedroom. Was that scary to put that on screen?

MD: Yes. It was scary. I didn’t even want to edit that. I had an editor, but I was pretty involved in everything, but that last part, I was like, “You edit it. I don’t want to edit it.” I was excited about the thing where, “Oh, I’m a woman, and I’m directing myself in a sex scene.” I think that definitely excited me, which is why I could stomach the discomfort.

BS: There’s also a lot of tension between intimacy, power, identity, and privilege in that scene.

MD: I think between two women, there are more layers. There’s the sexual tension, there could be more jealousy that exists between two women too, competitiveness. I mean, that happens with men too, but I don’t know. I know women much more than I know men. Between a man and a woman, it does happen. A man can feel threatened by a woman. I also was like, “Do we really want another story of an aggressive man?” I’d rather explore that with women instead.

So I came at it from, “Okay, so then we know all that. Yet Rita is still being a sub.” So it’s like she’s being a sub in many ways, and she’s understanding her privilege. She understands that there’s some frustration there because she’s continuing to be an artist. Echo’s not being an artist anymore. There’s an undertone of like, “Oh, people come to New York, and they are replacing the real New Yorkers.” That’s such a real thing too.

Then also, there’s the other layer of like, “Oh, well, you’re white, so you have privilege, and maybe you get to do certain things that I don’t get to do.” All of that is whatever you want to think of it. It’s just all there on the table, however you want to see it. So then the fact that she almost suffocates… She obviously didn’t want to, but Rita wants that. Is she erasing herself in a way? Does she feel guilty? There are just so many different questions that come up.

Also, that is a genuine kink thing. I watched this lesbian documentary, I forget what it was called, but it was this San Francisco group of leather lesbians. One of the things that moved me about it was that they were talking about how sometimes you get into those really intense moments where someone’s life is literally in another person’s hands, with edgeplay. They’ll have a knife, and the other person is like, “In that moment, they could have killed me, and I would have been okay with it.”

That to me is so interesting. I’ve never experienced that personally, and this movie doesn’t really go all the way there. But I was inspired by that idea of, like, “Oh my God, you can be so taken by someone.” I don’t know. I just think that moment is also this complete acceptance of one another.

BS: That idea of acceptance feels central to the whole short. Is that what ultimately brings Echo and Rita together?

MD: Yeah. I think the way a lot of people in my culture and in my life express intimacy is through this performative kind of conflict. That’s how you show intimacy. There’s a theatricality to it. My family, a lot of my friends. So the one time that they finally drop all that is in the end.

BS: Why did you choose to shoot the film in black and white?

MD: I love French New Wave, and I love Cinema Verité. I thought the complex subject matter lent itself very well to the French New Wave, the way I wanted to explore it without being overly explanatory. With French New Wave, you’ll look at something, and then it cuts to something else. I think that French New Wave just explores a lot of nuanced stuff. I thought it was cool to use that kind of style with a very contemporary story about two Latin women from America.

I want to make that distinction. In my experience, so much of the arthouse stuff about Latin America is from Latin America. Often it’s not from here. It’s not like the American Latin experience. It’s the Latin American experience that has produced a lot of beautiful arthouse films. I just want to do something that I would want to watch. Shadows by John Cassavetes was a big inspiration, and that also deals with color. One of them is One-Eighth Black, and he didn’t know. That inspired it too. So I thought black and white is interesting because then everything is black and white.

BS: Does directing yourself change your performance compared with having someone else direct you? Do you feel more free or more constrained?

MD: I think a trap of directing yourself is being a control freak and knowing exactly how things are going to go. I didn’t want that because I wanted to have that Cinema Verité style that feels very raw, spontaneous, and anything goes. That’s what I like to watch. So I was like, “I still want to do that, but now I’m directing myself.” That was hard to do. I think I did do that. But it was hard.

BS: Was the dialogue scripted, or did you leave room for improvisation?

MD: The park scene was unscripted, a little more loose.

BS: Do you prefer working from a script or improvising?

MD: I like a combination.

BS: You shot that park scene in New York without permits. What was that experience like?

MD: That was the hardest scene to shoot, the park scene. It was guerrilla style. Tompkins Square Park.

BS: What made you decide to make the film yourself? Was it something that kept eating away at you?

MD: Yeah. It definitely eats away. I was kind of daring myself the whole time. I admire really bold artists that are honest and unapologetic. I think a lot of singers are that way, and some performance artists are that way. I was like, “Oh, I’m tired of being afraid. I want to do something that is just all out there.” That’s the thing, other people watching it might be like, “Okay, that’s not that crazy.” But for me, it was. I was like, “I want to make something that’s unmistakable. This bitch is about that life.”

BS: Now that the film is out in the world and has premiered at several places, has it been cathartic to finally share it?

MD: I do love talking about it. It’s kind of embarrassing how much I love talking about it. Yes, it’s been so cathartic because I felt like when I’ve shown it in certain places, there’s the feeling that I wanted to have, which is people being excited and wanting to talk about it. I wanted people to feel like they had discovered something just for them. That’s what I want people to feel like. It’s not for everyone, but if it speaks to you in that way, it’s like, “Oh my God, I found this secret.”

That’s how I want people to feel. I think that I have been feeling that in certain places, especially queer spaces. We did a screening in the Bronx with Non Films, and that was special too. Even when I posted the trailer on Instagram right now, I don’t have a huge following, but the Instagram algorithm not only gave it to my people, it also started pushing it out and getting new followers. I’m like, “Fuck yeah!” That’s so exciting to me.

I’m not the biggest watcher of television, but when something hooks me, I lock all the way in. It’s rare, but it happens, and one such show that sank its teeth into me was MTV’s delightful take on the Scream franchise. More so than the modern reboot movies, I thought the show nailed the zeitgeist capturing the charms of the originals, and honestly, was just a lot of fun to check in with week to week. The show’s highlight, unquestionably, was Carlson Young as Brooke Maddox, the show’s resident Mean Girl. Far and away the actor who “got the assignment,” as they say, the best, Young was a much-welcome addition to the Scream series’ pantheon of memorable characters.

Fast forward to January of 2021, and Sundance is virtual for the first time ever, which means I can finally attend. There may have been something going on with the world, I don’t know. Digging through the schedule, The Blazing World, directed by Carlson Young, caught my eye immediately. I hadn’t seen her since Scream’s cancellation and was so curious to hear that the best part of that show had made her own movie. The program still was equally eye-catching, a terrified Young against a blood red set, colors popping off the page (or screen, I guess). Her film, a bizarre fantasia about a woman whose trauma draws her into an alternate universe full of neon greens, sickly sweet pinks, and floating orbs, was one of my favorites of the festival. More than anything, it signalled that her directing sensibility was equally electric as her instincts as a performer.

Young has gone on to direct a lovely little romcom, Upgraded, starring Riverdale’s Camila Mendes, and now, she’s jumped into the world of action-thriller with Trust. Starring Sophie Turner as an A-list movie star whose world is turned upside down after a scandal, she retreats to a secluded Airbnb. Once there, she finds herself in a fight for her life when some criminals show up to rob what they think is an empty home.

Comparisons to Panic Room are easy but Trust is the exact kind of down-and-dirty thriller we used to get a hundred of a year. Light on its feet with a playful sense of dread, Trust proves Young to not only be adept at horror or comedy but at action as well, a standout set piece involving a room filling with water, all done practically. It’s been a thrill to watch Young try her hand at so many different kinds of film since making the transition to director, all while maintaining her own sense of self.

Ahead of Trust’s digital release, I sat down to chat with Young about Trust, what she brings to directing as an actor, and how she keeps her voice when directing someone else’s script.

(This interview was conducted on August 12)

Brandon Streussnig: In Scream, your performance really stood out and was most in tune with the tone of the show. That same energy seems to carry over into your directing. Blazing World and Upgraded are very fun in different ways. When you’re directing, how much of your own approach as a performer translates into how you direct?

Carlson Young: It definitely directly translates. Thank you for everything you said because it kind of jogs my brain. I think just in comedy, everything is so much deeper than it has any right to be, and I just often think, “What's the point?” Unless we can go really deep and laugh about it? Maybe it's just my Scorpio, but I really like it down there. You have to bring the levity, and yeah, I mean, I think I'm subverting my own expectations and other people's when you have a story on your hands, and it's like, how can I connect my story to the big story, the one that we're all inside of? That's what I try to do.

BS: What have you been enjoying about directing compared to acting?

CY: I like reading a script and seeing if I can picture one scene incredibly well, what the emotional arc would be if it's in just one scene. That’s how I pursue something. I'm loving, loving, loving directing. I just feel like it's my full 360. I get to use my entire brain. And it’s not that I didn't with acting, but I really enjoy the process. I enjoy the birthing process of it. In a way, acting is kind of like one muscle. I feel like this is a full-body workout, and I really love it.

BS: This film makes such fun use of phones and second screens, which can be hard to make cinematic. What are the challenges of incorporating that kind of technology onscreen? I feel like filmmakers, even our best, are still shying away from it.

CY: Yeah, I know it's so baked in at this point, and that's a really cool observation. Thanks for bringing that up. You always have a conversation at the beginning of pre-production, like how are we going to approach phones? How are we going to utilize digital in this movie? And there's a lot of plot points here that we have to hit. I mean, she turns off her phone, and she's like, “Stop. fucking calling me.” She turns off her phone and slides it under the covers. We've done that a million times to go to sleep, and she's like, in that moment, you know what I mean? I think it's just using the technology to support the story. I believe that it's possible. I don't think that it's something that we need to shy away from in filmmaking.

BS: Both Camila Mendes and Sophie Turner, your leads in your last two films, also came from major TV shows. Did that shared background help you at all in collaboration?

CY: It definitely did. In this case, with this script, it mirrored us because we both started young. A child in the workplace is kind of an oxymoron. You don't really realize it until you're out of it. So a lot of it was reflective and analyzing those first few moments of innocence in a den of adults that you don't really know. It definitely helped our creative dialogue and trust. Then I just think more broadly, I love actors and can kind of understand the vulnerability that they're coming from, so I'm sure that it helps our communication.

BS: You and I are the same age, and I've also noticed familiar faces from our generation’s pop culture showing up in your films: Udo Kier, Anthony Stewart Head, and Katey Sagal. How does nostalgia or familiarity factor into your casting?

CY: With the exception of Udo, for whom I wrote that part specifically, it's all sort of happened really organically, and it's such a cool thing to bring in. Yeah, it's such a cool thing to bring into the space with every film that I direct. It's almost like being in good company and kind of having these tenents of your childhood supporting you. It's such a beautiful thing and even cooler when it happens to be organic.

BS: The Blazing World felt so personal. How do you stay connected to your voice when you’re directing scripts written by others?

CY: It's been the coolest part about each movie I've done so far, after Blazing World, is that the trick is to make it feel like me. It happens in my head first as I read the script, and then it happens in a very, very echoy way when we're shooting. Then, in the edit, I actually can hear the voice, and I understand why I did it. I enjoy planting seeds for myself and creating little scavenger hunts throughout projects. Even though it's not my script, I almost like it better because it really helps me to have a level of separation. Blazing World was a really personal one, and it was gut-wrenching, and I was really depressed, and it took so much out of me that it's been a real joy to have that creative separation and be able to look at things really objectively. That's been a real place of growth for me.

BS: Each of your films is a different genre: horror, rom-com, thriller. What’s drawing you to explore so many styles?

CY: I'm just not attached to genre. I respond to character and story, and the sort of archetypal journeys of it. I love the heroine's journey. I can really always get down with a mother-daughter dynamic and a woman who is reclaiming her power in some way. As I'm saying this out loud, I would love to go through that same process with a male character.

BS: Your partner (Isom Innis) scores all your films. How do the two of you collaborate on building out the music?

CY: Just to use Trust as an example, I cut the movie with my editor, who's amazing, Louis (Cioffi). We did the whole film dry, no temp score or anything. It was hard. It's like pulling out your teeth. It's tough. I mean, there was nothing to hide behind in the edit. It is just performance. It is just you and the story and the characters, and you have to make it work without any seasoning because when you put the music on, things can hide. And I get that. I've learned that from experience. So we brought the film to him when it was a full rough cut and absolutely no score. So with this one, it's really fun. I think it's such a sick score, but he had a really fresh slate.

BS: You mentioned doing something with a male character, but is there something you’re excited about tackling next as director?

CY: Well, I actually start shooting this week on a sticky, sticky romance. I have not done anything like this, I’ll be the first to admit. I'm really excited. I'm up for the challenge.

*Trust is currently playing in theaters*

-Brandon Streussnig

As immigrant dreams fray under fluorescent lights and a cloud of senseless violence, Blue Sun Palace offers no grand statements, no thematic monologues. It doesn’t even offer a sense of familiar space. Constansce Tsang’s debut feature drops you into the confines of a shared community of Chinese immigrants and the familiarity they seek in an isolated pocket of Queens.

Starring Lee Kang-sheng and Ke-Xi Wu, Blue Sun Palace follows two immigrants as their lives are upended after a senseless moment of violence takes someone importnat for them. Neither knowing what their mutual friend meant to the other, the pair come together after her death in a platonic intimacy that only shared grief can bring. Would these two have connected under different circumstances? Perhaps, but Tsang’s quiet drop-ins are unconcerned with whether this is a relationship that means anything beyond this specific circumstance. Their loss becomes the ghost that haunts the film and we float through with it, watching as they find refuge within each other.

Steeped in memory and shot on hazy film, Tsang’s NYC is a ghost story. The pair haunt desolate malls and quiet backstreets, relishing the brief respite of love they share, if not for each other, than for their dead. Tsang’s vision isn’t just brimming with tender sensuality, whispers of quiet fury echo in every frame. From the exploitation of immigrant massage workers to the lack of care from larger society surround violence against Asian immigrants and Americans, hers is a delicate elegy for those we ignore.

As Blue Sun Palace hits streaming, I recently sat down with Tsang to talk about dislocation, haunted malls, sliding into Lee Kang-sheng’s DMs and so much more.

Brandon Streussnig: I love how the film conveys dislocation. You often can’t tell that most of it takes place in New York. I think that goes a long way to getting at how immigrants can find their own pockets of refuge, no matter where they are. Can you talk about how you chose to frame that?

Constance Tsang: It's actually quite similar to what you're saying in terms of how these communities are able to find a sense of family everywhere. When I started thinking about the visual language more or less specifically that space and how the characters would interact in that space, I was thinking about what my parents' journey from Hong Kong to New York was during that period, our lives together, my feelings of them, and the friendships that I have formed. It always felt like it could have been anywhere.

For me, when I was observing them, it never felt like they were actually trying to form relationships that were outside of this community of language that they shared. That's where the decision to keep it closed and to keep the exteriors out of focus came from. I often feel like the exteriors in the relationship to the story are not really about showing New York because this is not the New York that they see.

It's more about their day-to-day life and what they see in terms of the spaces that they're also confined to. We talk about the theme of boundaries, boundaries being crossed, boundaries being attacked. So all of that played into this very specific visual decision.

BS: While watching this, I was reminded a bit of Lav Diaz’s Batang West Side. Very different films, of course, but each center a moment of senseless violence as a means to unfurl those feelings of culturual isolation. When you were writing this, what went into attaching those themes to the central act of violence?

CT: It's a good question. I would say that the moment of violence was always —unfortunately I think “centerpiece” gives it a bit too much of a light on it — but I think it's really that this is the moment that changes everything, and this is the moment that sets the course for the rest of the film. This is the moment that creates all these absences. When looking back on my reasons for writing this film, there were, of course, all of these sort of cultural and societal events taking place in the news that were affecting the story itself.

My feelings towards the massage parlor industry in general, but the way that violence is depicted in everyday life. When I watch violence in films, I often feel like it's quite sensationalized. So I really wanted to take a different approach and make it feel grounded and rooted, especially in a story that was also personal. There are all of these things in my head in terms of how I was approaching it, but yes, it was always a centerpiece in how it affected everyone. The normality of it was really important to me.

BS: Lee Kang-sheng, is of course, a legend. He’s able to show so much through that face of his, it’s remarkable. How did casting him come about?

CT: Yeah, he has such a cinematic face, doesn't he? He's really incredible. Casting Lee came through one of my film school friends who's now a producer in China, and she, through different layers of the film industry in China, was able to connect with this actress that worked with him. Then the actress told him about me. Through a sort of game of telephone, it got to me, where he told my producer to send my info to him via Instagram. So I just DMed him and we were able to connect that way, and he read the script, and maybe a couple of days later, we met for a phone call. It all felt very fast.

BS: That’s kind of incredible that one of our great living actors is just readily available via Instagram. Wow. What were the conversations like in approaching his character?

CT: He is a man of few words, but when he does say things, they are ones that we should listen to. In our very first conversations, we talked a bit about what he felt was still missing from the charater. He gave suggestions and was very encouraging about continuing to develop the character. That was the initial sort of response to it. When we actually started working together in person, we had two weeks of rehearsal. So that was when he brought all of his thoughts.

We would sit down through each of the scenes and go through scene by scene what was working dialogue wise and what wasn't. That was kind of our working relationship and approaching scene work together.

BS: Then you have Ke-Xi Wu who’s just astonishing in this. I’d seen her in Nina Wu and was taken by her, but she’s so fundamentally different here. Can you talk to me a bit about her?

CT: It was because I also watched Nina Wu. I saw her in that movie and I was like, "Wow, she's amazing. Why have I not seen more of her?" Of course, I come to find out she's had this long relationship with Midi (Z), so I was watching not just Nina Wu, but all of the ones that she did previously with him. I had wanted to work with her right from the beginning. But at that time, when we first started the casting process, it was much harder to have two actors who were international. So it took a little bit of back and forth to have Ke-Xi in our film. The film is absolutely better for it.

BS: She’s truly stunning in it. As is Haipeng Xu. She’s really the linchpin of the whole film. If you don’t fall for her the way Cheung does, it doesn’t work. What was the process like in making sure she lingered over the film, beyond the script, of course?

CT: I'd love to talk about just even with the casting of Haipeng, because I had seen her through a tape that she had sent and an interview that she had given. When I saw her, she was very much like the Didi I had written. She's got a lot of light, and she's just a lovely human being. The way that she shines on screen is the same way that she is in person. There is no faking it. I was just so drawn to her, and I could feel her charisma in all these types of ways. I knew that the person who would be playing Didi needed to have that because she's lost so early. That it needed to be someone that we genuinely loved and that I felt like I was in love with. In order to have that effect and to have that impression over time.

BS: There’s such a sensuality in how the three leads love as well. First romantic and then platonic, after the shift. There’s so much talk about the lack of sensuality in cinema in general, but you show many different ways one can be sensual between the three.

CT: When we're talking about sensuality and bodies interacting with each other in contrast to the space, I think about that quite often. The contrast and the environment itself are already so harsh. What I was looking for was just warmth between the characters and between bodies. I often thought about that. How can we create relationships that… I mean, “cozy” is a strange thing to say but something that felt familiar and gentle. I wanted the feeling of gentleness.

BS: You have these long, lingering takes of people just sitting with one another or themselves. Shooting on film, how did you approach that, knowing it’s a much different ask than when you’re shooting on digital?

CT: Yeah, it is different. Even talking about the shorts I did before this, I felt like those were such exercises for me because it's very different in terms of even the visual language. But what I did learn from those shorts was the process of working on film and what it takes to shoot on film, the rehearsal process, and how many takes do you go for? All of that was really helpful in getting me ready for this. Sustaining a take like this, the writing of it, and the movement of it, that was a whole different monster.

I think that actually had a lot to do with my philosophy or my thinking of how scenes should work. Because if you look at my shorts, it's not like that at all. It's like we catch this beat, we move on shot, shot, shot, shot. With Blue Sun, something had happened where during the pandemic, I would spend a lot of time, of course, watching movies, but I also got my hands on, a collection of essays that Tarkovsky wrote called “Sculpting in Time.” That really changed the way that I thought about shooting, cinema, and time.

BS: On that same note, your color palette is gorgeous. The pink and blue pastels in Didi’s bedroom give way to a cooler, more dissonant blue after the act of violence, can you tell me about devolping that?

CT: The color palette was something that I had responded to in a couple of locations that we saw. Filmmaking for me is much more tactile, and I don't necessarily storyboard. For me, locations and working around real spaces were incredibly helpful. When I first started location scouting, and it's a low budget movie so I was location scouting alone, I had found a couple of businesses that were just those colors. They were pinks, they were blues, they had the curtains already. I would then take pictures and kind and clock it in my head. I was like, "Oh, wow, this is really beautiful."

That's kind of where the initial sort of color palette came from, just from me interacting with these spaces. Then of course, I was like, "Oh, wow, that actually makes sense in the story, because in the beginning, it's all warm and beautiful and lovely." We basically had these color palettes that I saw and then just made it work for the theme of the film.

BS: Talking about locations, I know you’re from Flushing, and so much of the film takes place there. I wouldn’t say the film is surreal, but it does have a hazy, dreamlike quality. I’m not a spiritual person, but I find a lot of spirituality within film. So I like to ask this question about more personal films, were there ever moments when you were shooting in a place you’re so familiar with, where reality and fiction maybe began to blur?

CT: Oh, of course. There is a spiritual element in this film. You're picking it up correctly. Most of the main locations are yes, Flushing, but they are also in other Chinatowns. The Brooklyn Chinatown, for example, and also in the Manhattan Chinatown.

In the Manhattan Chinatown, we shot predominantly in the construction supply store where Cheung works. That for me is a place that I had known since I was a kid. I know the owners; they’re family friends, as my mom works in real estate.

Both of my parents worked in management. So that's kind of how I was able to get that space and think about that character. But that space in particular brought me back to my own childhood memories. And of course, there's the East Broadway Mall. That location was a place of activity and of meals, because on the top floor, it used to be this really opulent dim sum hall. I don't know if they're still open anymore, but now, it's a space where Amy and Cheung walk through after they have a meal together. It's all very desolate, and everything is for rent.

I think about that place being incredibly surreal because it's empty, but yet all of my feelings and all of my memories there are so full, and I can't quite shake that feeling of a ghostliness. That's what I was trying to do through Blue Sun Palace as well. I thought about it as a ghost story in a sense.

BS: Much of my familiarity around Lunar New Year is based on the wacky comedies, but many moments of transition occur around the holiday here. What drew you to that?

CT: I think the irony, then the sort of absurdity of the situation, was so sad to me that it was supposed to be this time of rebirth and transformation and luck and joy, and it only belongs to other people and not them. I thought that was really striking in the overall sort of journey of the story.

BS: I’ve found myself talking to many independent filmmakers recently, true independent, I mean, and I’ve been asking many of them this: in an environment so unfriendly to indie film, especially in this present moment, what keeps you going?

CT: How do I get up and do this every day? I don't know. <laughs> Sometimes it's harder. Some days are harder than others. But I think, for me, making movies in this way and making films independently and the stories that I want to tell, they are the things that drive me to get up in the morning because it is the one of the only things that I do in my life that fulfills me and gives me meaning, if nothing else. I think that is something to hold onto.

*Blue Sun Palace is now streaming on MUBI*

-Brandon Streussnig

Societal views on aging range from “how cute!” to “how sad.” Rarely do we see an elderly person as our equal. It’s shameful for a myriad of reasons, but the biggest is that, as with anyone else, they are people. People with hopes, dreams, desires, and fears. This shouldn’t need to be reiterated; it should come to us naturally. But these views aren’t helped by a cinematic history filled with the elderly being mocked or looked down upon. They’re less a human being, but an idea to be treated with faux concern.

Many films depict memory loss with sensitivity, but they almost all approach it from a place of mourning. For lack of a better term, these are disease-forward films that eschew the humanity of their subject to show you the ravages of dementia. Equal parts devastating and terrifying to be sure, but how can we fully understand if we can’t hold space for the person within?

Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch isn’t so much a forceful rebuke to this notion but a lovely, empathetic ode to what it means to be human in the wake of debilitating illness. Following Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) through her transition into assisted living, Familiar Touch is a journey into finding oneself when that self is so difficult to locate every day. Almost episodic in its structure, we experience life with Ruth and live in her world. A world where faces may not be easily identifiable, but sounds and textures that have shaped a life are baked into every fiber of her being.

Friedland’s tactile frames allow us to feel every thread of Ruth’s worn shirt against her skin. Her soundscape transports us into fractured sonic memories. When you lose your memory, your senses heighten. It’s as if your body is trying to ground you in something familiar because your mind can’t place it. In tandem with Friedland is Kathleen Chalfant’s delicate and gorgeous performance. So playful and alive, we never quite know what age Ruth actually is. Unconcerned with a didactic re-telling of somebody’s life, Friedland and Chalfant create a character who is life. She wants, she desires, she feels, she yearns. She craves the sensual pleasures of being touched. Not sexually or intimately, but just a simple grasping of a hand. A reminder that she’s still here, present in the world, even if her mind is on a journey of its own.

A stunning performance in a breathtaking film, Familiar Touch is one of the year’s best. In merging her disparate experiences of working as a caregiver to the elderly and her background in dance and movement, Friedland’s cinematic voice is immediately singular. Narrative and linear storytelling are mere shadows, outlining something more textured and amorphous. In doing so, she lets Ruth live as she is, and it’s on you to take that journey with her.

As Familiar Touch hits digital platforms, I sat down with Friedland to discuss the film, what it means to “evict a person from liveliness,” reframing how we view the elderly, and her forceful condemnation of the ongoing genocide in Gaza that came during the biggest moment of her career.

Brandon Streussnig: What’s immediately identifiable is the tactility of your images. The way you linger on her hands or Ruth’s faded white t-shirt. It’s such an evocative way to convey a heightening of senses that comes with memory loss. Can you tell me about building that out?

Sarah Friedland: I really appreciate you isolating that as a focus for our conversation. It was something that was really, really important to me in crafting this. And it's something that was very much a collaboration between myself, our cinematographer, Gabe C. Elder, our production designer, Stephanie Osin Cohen, and our sound designer, Eli Cohn. It starts from a few different concepts. One is just my background is in making dance films. I'm really interested in crafting characters through their embodiment. So, even though Familiar Touch isn't explicitly a dance film, I thought about writing it as if it were. To show Ruth's experience and to show the other characters' experiences through the patterns of their bodies. That's sort of how I approach screenwriting, as a kind of process of movement notation. So even my relationship to cinema itself starts from the body, but then there were two different reasons that the tactility was important to me.

One is, as you suggested, folks with memory loss, as much as their cognition declines, the other senses intensify. It's something that I think a lot of people don't know about dementia. Touch, taste, smell, all of these senses are quite heightened for people with memory loss. So when thinking about how to create a film from Ruth's perspective, I wanted that perspective not to be ocular and not to be cognitive. I think our narratives around dementia often depict a sort of tragedy of decline and are usually about a person losing themselves. I think that narrative is dependent upon an idea of a selfhood that is cognitive, that we are our brains, we are our memories, we are our linguistic cogency, rather than selfhood being an experience of all of our senses. And that our sensation, our embodiment, is just as much a part of who we are as our cognition is.

So that was a big motivating factor in why I wanted the film to have this tactility and this sense of sensation. The other motivation was also wanting to connect to Ruth's desire. I think one of the ways that ageism and sexism sort of intertwine terribly in our storytelling is that older women are often infantilized and shown as not having any sexuality or desire. If they do, it's the butt of a joke. So I wanted the film to really honor Ruth's desire, even in moments when it is sort of expressed inappropriately, to still honor that impulse for connection, for pleasure, and for that not to just show up on screen as sort of a sexual impulse, but as a material one. Our relationship to the materials, as you pointed out on our bodies, the textures that we touch on a daily basis, the food we eat, the contact that we have with other bodies, that kind of connection to the material world around us is a huge part of our experience of being alive. I wanted the language of the film to reflect it.

BS: You pointed out Ruth’s sensuality, and that’s something I’ve so rarely seen in cinema. Her desire doesn’t even manifest sexually, but in wanting to be held by someone, anyone. Is that something you experienced having worked with the elderly?

SF: I think the simplest way to put it, and it almost sounds dumb to say, is when I started working as a caregiver, one of the first places where I noticed my own ageism shifting was seeing that older adults are just like us. It's almost laughable to say, because of course they are. But it is sort of a bias that causes us to often see or think of older adults as other, and that their experience of humanity is somehow different than ours. Older adults are us in a few years if we are lucky. That desire to be touched, to be seen, to connect, that doesn't go anywhere. Because of how our society silos older adults in a number of different ways, both physically, spatially, and psychologically, so many older adults experience immense isolation.

That manifests in a drought of touch that many older adults experience. I'm not talking about sexual touch specifically, but just touch in general. So many older adults just don't experience being touched on a day-to-day basis. I found that as a caregiver, that was an important part of my job. Without crossing any boundaries within a realm of professionalism, to be in physical contact with my clients, to hold their hand, to have a hand on their back gently as we're walking. With one client, we would always link arms when we went for a walk, just feeling connected to the world around us. There's a wonderful quote in a Grace Paley story that I love that I think encapsulates how ageism isolates older adults. It's a story of hers called Old Friends. One character says to the other that she didn't meet this other character's eyes in the street because she says, “I didn't want to remind you of your coming eviction, first from liveliness then from life.” This idea that we evict people from liveliness while they're still living, I think, is an apt encapsulation of that isolation that is experienced on a bodily level.

BS: In constructing Ruth’s performance with Kathleen, what kind of conversations did you have? It’s so interesting how non-linear her performance is. We never see her at the same age mentally. It’s as if Ruth is responding to each moment through a script that her brain has written. It’s like a performance or repetition in a way.

SF: I think that bringing the lens of cognitive disability to how we treat people with dementia can be a helpful way of seeing, because it is a cognitive disability in its way. Therefore trying to meet someone where they're at and seeing the ways in which they are expressing themselves and affirming that, then affirming the person that's there rather than focusing on a sense of loss or deficit. I think in that way, conversations around ableism and memory loss can productively intersect. One of the choices that Kathy and I made pretty early on, I think it was maybe our second or third day of filming, is we decided that we would stop talking about what had come before and where we were within the script.

It's very common most of the time, as you know, when shooting a feature film, you don't actually shoot it in sequence. So a sort of standard practice is a director, sometimes a script supervisor is involved too, will orient the people in a given scene and be like, “okay, this is coming right after we did this and we shot this or we haven't shot this,” but there's a sense of orientation to be able to calibrate and link how one scene is performed to the one that comes before or after. We realized that was actually getting in the way of us building this character together. We wanted Ruth to be all ages and no age at all. Yes, she appears to us as this 80-something woman who is moving into a care facility, but she also has access to all of the Ruths she has ever been, as we all do.

The idea of age identity is really interesting to me and something that was key for Kathy and I in talking about Ruth, that all of us can access our child self, our teenage self, and we bring those selves with us. But it's particularly pronounced for people who are older and have memory loss because there's this loss of inhibition and a sense of timelessness and living in the present moment. It's interesting what you're saying about performance and repetition, because in a way, we were thinking about unmooring ourselves from any kind of markers of sequence. It was fairly liberating for me coming into making a first narrative work, that, in some ways, is disinterested in the kind of linear logic that kind of scaffolds most narrative films.

BS: It feels so episodic, which I think is a perfect way to convey this illness. Going back to the tacility, that’s helped along by a gorgeous soundscape. The moment of Ruth floating in the pool as the sound turns into a memory play of beach days gone by brought me to tears. How did you create these overwhelming sonic moments?

SF: I was wonderfully lucky to work with a brilliant sound designer named Eli Cohn. One of the earliest choices I made in the writing was that there would be no soundtrack and that we would hear the world as Ruth does. I was thinking about that heightened sensation as sort of being the score for the film. Something that a lot of older adults experience, and particularly those with memory loss, is that the spatial dimension of sound shifts. The idea of “this sound that I'm hearing is far away, and this sound is close” can often kind of collapse. So, to a certain extent, these details were written in the script, but then I created my own secondary document that was a sonic score, and that was the starting point for Eli and me to work from. Just trying to imagine what Ruth is hearing in each of these spaces.

Then we decided to mix it in a way that's kind of counterintuitive. Most films are mixed where you’re usually you're trying to push all of the ambient sounds away from the proximity of the characters. We did the opposite and brought them very, very close to allow the sounds of this world to close in on Ruth. Part of that was a desire for us to hear Ruth's loss of home. I wanted people to viscerally experience what it is like for Ruth to lose her home of many decades. I did a survey for the residents at Villa Gardens where we collaborated on what sounds were significant to them in marking that transition into a care setting.

So many of them remarked on the institutional sounds. So the sound of an HVAC, the lights having a particular pitch, hearing labor, a shift change, walkie-talkies, the leaf blower, and the maintenance staff coming in at the same time every Wednesday. These details were representative to them of this transition. To me, the most moving was several of them remarked on fearing the sound of an ambulance and hoping that the siren isn't coming for your friend, and certainly not coming for you. So that was this repertoire of notes that Eli worked with. He also has a musical background. So we really thought about creating a score from the ambient sounds of the film and using that logic of Ruth's heightened sensation to allow certain moments, like the pool or the hallway scene with the lights, to imagine a sonic surrealism that accumulates from this heightened sensitivity. He did some incredible things with that. For example, the lights in the hallway, he recorded different sounds of a cello, he's a cellist, and he recorded a cello. Then he would sort of play with the pitch up or down and assign them to different lights so that the lights would start harmonizing depending on how many were on. He created this music out of the ambient sounds of institutional space.

BS: I’m fascinated by your approach to blocking. I think when people think of choreography, their minds go to either dance or fight films. How did your background in movement and dance influence the way you blocked this film?

SF: Honestly, I'm in awe of other filmmakers who don't have that background because it's like, I don't know how I could figure out blocking without a language of movement and space. So I'm very grateful for that because it has given me a language to prepare. I think to me, directing is the most choreographic job there is, other than actual choreography. It's all about modulating distance within space and within the constraints of the space. I don't just mean of actors, but of the distance between a camera and a subject, the difference between a microphone and a subject, even the distance between where your crew is watching a monitor and an actor, and how that changes the feeling of a set. So much of my job is really just about carefully calibrating and mapping those distances in different moments in time.

The way that I work with my DP, Gabe Elder and production designer, Stephanie Osin Cohen, is once I have a sort of rough draft of my shot list and Stephanie has her plans for her drawings of each set, we start drawing overhead diagrams and we kind of map out the shot: this is where the cameras are, this is where the actors are, etc. Then we'll often, in the location itself, simulate those different positions ourselves. So there is this kind of choreographic drawing, then practicing that helps figure out a shot list. So yeah, I'd say that blocking is kind of very carefully calibrated, but then the great joy is that an actor comes on the set. It's important to me to also give people freedom because I think if you're asking them to hit certain marks all the time, it’s constraining. So I try to create blocking that has a sense of precision within the frame that also balances a feeling of liberty for an actor. I think that's the dance of it, and it's so much fun to negotiate that on the day.

BS: As this country strips away Medicaid and healthcare, and really, just attacks medicine in general, this film feels like art as advocacy in so many ways. What’s something you’d like to see more of from people in advocating for older folks? What material efforts can we be making right now?

SF: First of all, the thing that I think is most important is that Trump's budget bill is stripping away older adult care, and Medicaid provides care for 17 million older adults and people with disabilities. We need universal older adult care, and we need to compensate care workers with a living wage. To me, those are the two most important things. It's intolerable to me that we live in a society that devalues older adults and the people who care for them. So, from a sort of cultural and storytelling perspective, I think we need to help each other see the full personhood of older adults and not see aging as a withering away of humanity, but rather a type of transition. And for that, of course, to then impact how we value caregivers. Caregivers do work that makes living possible, and therefore, we should see it as the most important work there is. That's my soapbox.

BS: You spoke out so forcefully about the Genocide of Palestinians at the hands of Israel at last year’s Venice Film Festival. You spoke at a time when it was still, embarrassingly, unpopular to do so on such a large scale. What brought that about, right after you’d won an award for your debut feature?

SF: A number of things. One is, I think, to a certain degree, there's almost this logic of filmmakers being delegates for their country. I think that comes from the history of how film festivals are structured and the history of the Biennale, where even if it's not explicit, you are a kind of cultural delegate for your nation. And for me, as an American taxpayer, A and then B, as a Jew, I am paying for this genocide as an American, and then culturally it is being done in my name and my so-called safety. So I felt that it was my responsibility to use whatever tools are at my disposal to try and stop this. Very few people have access to a televised broadcast that's going all over the world. I did. So it felt to me like a moral responsibility.

The other thing I was thinking about was the history of Venice and its connection to fascism and nationalism, and the site of Palazzo del Cinema, having that history felt meaningful to me as a location to speak from. But then also thinking about what a filmmaker is. I am not a politician. I'm not an orator, but I'm a timekeeper. Filmmakers are people who don’t just keep time, but they make time and they shape it. The reality of this genocide is that every minute, every hour, every day, that it's not stopped, that time is life and lives that are being lost. So, I think it is the responsibility of filmmakers. There is a politics to timekeeping that I think is inherent to the work of filmmaking and that also informed what I was doing. I believe risk is necessary in moments of violence.

Familiar Touch is now available on all VOD platforms.

-Brandon Streussnig

Brain rot is unavoidable. We were likely always headed towards endless scrolling, thirty-second videos of lunatics speaking in bizarre cadences about the Money Mindset and isolation, but the pandemic and proliferation of AI slop have absolutely sped up the timeline. Many filmmakers have spent the better part of the last five years trying to capture the ways in which our world has both changed and is deeply fucked, but few have yet to capture the humanity in being forced to live this way. It’s easy to say “Capitalism sucks, the gig economy is a nightmare,” but who are the people actually doing these jobs? What of their hopes and dreams?

Julian Glander’s Boys Go to Jupiter, a CG-animated delight, doesn’t seek to answer what we’re supposed to do about ~modern living~ but rather put a name and face to the kind of person who runs (well, scooters) across town delivering shitty fast food. Food delivery isn’t a new way to make money, but Uber Eats, DoorDash, Seamless, and a million other apps have made the act of ordering and receiving your meals as isolated as possible. You can have a Wednesday Whopper Meal (I’m told this is a normal Whopper with a purple bun) from Burger King at your door in twenty minutes without having to say a simple “thank you” to a single person involved in the process. It’s an absurd way to live, and it’s the job we find Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett) doing when we meet him.

Billy, a typical teen deadset on breaking out of his small town, spends his hazy summer days delivering for an app called “Grubster.” With a goal in mind of $5000, Billy hustles all over town, desperate to make enough scratch to escape to freedom. As he bounces around watching grindset videos, sometimes with his gang of friends in tow, he encounters all manner of suburban weirdos, including an alien and her gloopy children, and through them, may just find a purpose to his drifting life. A “typical” coming-of-age tale, as it were.

Candy-coated pinks and blues, rounded and bubbly characters, and a top-down video game-esque view obscure an insidious vibe that Glander peppers in delicately. This isn’t a serious film, not even close, but that bird’s eye view takes on an air of surveillance as Billy finds himself embroiled in fruit-based corporate espionage. The shock of color and gummy candy animation lull you (and Billy) into a sense of dreamy complacency, that brain rot easing in to keep you running in place. Boys Go to Jupiter isn’t just a cutesy farce with a who’s who of alt comedians doing voices (Eva Victor, Sarah Sherman, Janeane Garofalo, Grace Kuhlenschmidt, and Joe Pera, among many more). It’s a clear-eyed, if wacky, look at the absurdity of our tech, money, and status-obsessed culture. Glander’s way in being a disaffected teen and some sleek, weird little aliens creates a soft pillow bedrock for his more hardened ideas.

Made over a few years through Blender (during a recent Q&A at IFC Center in New York, Glander’s advice to an aspiring filmmaker was as simple as “download Blender, watch a ton of Blender tutorials, and you’re 90% of the way there”), Boys Go to Jupiter is largely a one-man operation. Glander is the first to credit the collaboration with his voice cast or some of the lovely songs provided by Miya Folick, but the bulk of this film was created from the ground up by his vision. That’s a rare thing in today’s animated landscape, even rarer to animate it almost entirely by yourself. Even the best stop-motion artists have teams of people bending their clay creations into shape.

Very funny, dead-on in its observations, and just so fun to look at, Boys Go to Jupiter announces Julian Glander as a unique voice in the animation world, jumping beyond shorts and into features. With his film’s release rolling right along, I caught up with Glander as he’d just left NYC to debut the film in LA.

As we begin, he’s admiring my wall of Blu-rays behind me, a carefully curated selection that exists to look great on a Zoom call. Mission accomplished, I suppose.

Brandon Streussnig: This is a good way to start because I feel like worrying about what our Zoom backgrounds should look like was something we never thought would be a thing to contend with. Your film exists in a world, much like ours, swirling in the kind of brain rot that exploded during COVID. How do you, personally, avoid it? Or do you? I’m asking because I need help. <laughs>

Julian Glander: How do I avoid it? I don't! My screen time is so bad. <laughs> Currently, I'm at four hours of screen time a day on my phone. It's mostly TikTok. I'm down from six hours a day at the beginning of the year. I'm down from eight hours a day of Fortnite, which I was doing in the deepest parts of the pandemic. I can get addicted to any repetitive, colorful, bright, dopamine-releasing thing. It doesn't even have to be fun or entertaining or good. So no, I don't avoid it. I'm really trying to build a better life for myself where I'm not with the phone all the time. But yeah, I think the movie is about a lot of the new relationships with the world that we've had to create and the new rituals we've had to create over the pandemic.

The Zoom background is one. The doom scrolling is obviously something that has hyper-accelerated. Then there are also a lot of these rituals around food and on-demand services that are very antisocial. The contactless drop off emerged out of a germophobic era of the pandemic, but then it stayed with us even though we're not worried about being sick anymore. I think we're sitting in that antisocial convenience, but there's also the fact that there's almost a script to it and a rhythm: the drivers coming, so stay away from the door, the driver's setting the thing down, he's taking the picture, and now you can open the door. It feels like a comedy script. So it was rich to make a movie around it.

BS: It really does feel like comedy. There have been times when I know the guy is out there waiting for the elevator, and I'm like, “WHAT am I doing? I should just go grab it and say “hi! Thank you!” It hit me a year or two ago, where I was just like… “Wow. I'm an asshole. What am I doing? Why am I just waiting for this person to leave? They just did a very kind thing for me.” It’s so anti-social and lazy.

JG: That's exactly what it is. I talked to Jack Corbett about this a lot because he worked as a delivery driver in high school and then a little bit in college at the beginning of this on-demand era. Something he said that was really interesting is that he felt like a lot of people that he was delivering to were embarrassed. I'll often create or I'll stage a scenario to make sure that the delivery driver knows either I'm really busy or I'm sick, that I had a good reason to not go pick up my own food. But I mean, it's kind of crazy because it is a huge luxury. To have somebody go to a restaurant, someone else cook the food, someone else drive it in their car to you… 30 years ago, that would have been considered a luxury only afforded to the top 1%. And now we all have it, and yet it really doesn't feel like a luxury. It feels like almost a curse or an embarrassment or something.

BS: Something I like that your film does is that it merges the absurdity and cynicism around all of that with very cutesty animation. I mean, the alien creatures in this are adorable. I’ll be honest, that kind of aesthetic or humor can bounce off of me at times, but it really didn’t here. How important was that balance for you?

JG: I think one of the big challenges throughout the whole movie is what story makes sense to tell with this visual approach? And it certainly lends itself to certain things. I really like that the characters are minimal and not super expressive because it leaves a lot of room for the voice actors. The character designs came in after the voice actors, and I felt like I had so much there that I didn't want to step on it. I didn't want things to be redundant, where if the characters are doing a lot of screaming, their body and their face don't need to be doing that.

I think sinister is an interesting way to put it because we're so far away from these characters, and we see them in this sort of almost diorama setup. There's a feeling of surveillance or voyeurism that develops, and then from that, there's a feeling that something bad is going to happen to all of these characters. While they're talking about their plans for the future and how they're all going to get rich, we, as the camera, very slowly zoom out. There's almost a little bit of this horror movie feeling where it's like, when is something bad going to happen?”

So yeah, that's a balance that the movie kind of plays with, where we want to be in love and love hanging out with these characters, but we also know that this is all curdling into something else. That’s a big part of Billy's journey, his coming-of-age journey in this story; the beautiful, magical elements of childhood are slipping away from him the way they slip away from all of us.

BS: This is very much of a piece with one of your shorts, Tennis Ball on His Day Off. They both deal with the weird rabbit holes many people fall down in trying to succeed in modern society. You play a lot with…not quite the “Manosphere” but definite extensions of that, the “Moneysphere” as it were.

JG: It's funny because there's this character, Mr. Moolah, in the movie voiced by Demi Adejuyigbe, who is sort of a mystical financial advisor. He sort of talks about money as this thing that's going to come to you if you're aligned with the universe in a certain way. Originally, that character was written more as a traditional radio announcer, a radio DJ like Sam Jackson in Do the Right Thing, or the radio DJ in The Warriors who kind of guides you through the proceedings. It was going to be very much “Good Morning Tampa! The weather's 86 and it's the day after Christmas,” and there was a lot of stuff in the movie like that, where Billy was on a bike instead of on a scooter. As I spent time with the material, I thought, “I need to do things that happen now in this movie. I think this movie will hit people or mean a little bit more if we actually put it in a specific time instead of this sort of dreamy Spielbergian thing.” That's a very easy way to tell stories in because it's nonspecific, and you can take little pieces of everything, but I felt we needed to center more on the Now.

In terms of my information diet, I was getting a lot of this self-help money guy named Gary Vee, who I became really obsessed with.

BS: Oh man, I’m obsessed with that bozo. <laughs>

JG: I mean, he's out of his mind. Everything he says is crazy. When I was making Tennis Ball’s Day Off, he was sort of a strong cultural force, and the things that have come after him are actually so much more bizarre and insane. I started getting more of these fragmented small timers that had a couple of hundred followers. There was one that I kept getting called Five Dimensional Money Consciousness, which is…basically the idea that there is a certain amount of money that is destined to come to you. What I actually think is interesting is that it’s true, not in a cosmic way, but in a way that where we're born and what part of the world and what family we're born into really set some parameters for how well we can do financially. It's almost like behind every mystical belief, for every philosophical belief, there is some material truth like that.

All through the movie, Billy is exploring these different approaches to economics. Each one of these characters has their own view of what money is or what the relationship with work is, and they each only have one piece of the puzzle. They're each seeing this really complicated thing from one angle, and he's sort of on this journey to try to see it from every side.

BS: On the topic of work and our relationship to it, I was a janitor for ten years while working as a journalist. It’s the reason I called this “Janitor Diaries” and —

JG: That’s amazing.

BS: Yeah, man, thank you. I think what affected me the most is that, sure, the film exists in a “Capitalism sucks” mentality, but it isn’t this didactic statement, you know? There’s a real love for the people doing the work and their humanity.

JG: That really moves me to hear you say that. It's something I talk about all the time. I think artists should have jobs. I think the idea of studying art in school and then just beginning an art career and never having another experience or another career leads to a lot of bad art. I don't know if you feel like being a janitor ever informed your writing, or just even just having that time and that movement, but I think that’s important.

It’s definitely kind of hooked for people that this is an anti-capitalist movie, but I actually think the movie has capitalism in it. It's hard to talk about it without being against it because it's a system that we all understand as not working. But more than that, I think it's a movie about work and how people find meaning in their lives through work or away from work. I had to write the script to figure it out myself because at the time I was writing this, I was also like, “I'm not sure I want to do this anymore.” I had kind of wanted to go get certified to be an electrician. Just have something in my life that makes sense. So, my hope is that if the movie does something for people, it makes them think about work just a little bit deeper, or just take another look at their own work identity.

BS: Shifting gears a bit, when we talk about animation, I think the two modes most go to are either mega-budget CG stuff like Pixar or hand-made, stop-motion work. Your style exists in this realm where, yes, it’s CG, but somehow feels tactile and handmade. Can you talk a bit about your style and process?

JG: Yeah, I think it's funny that we've come around, and everyone has seen enough animation that they can see 3D animation and feel that it's handmade. I think that's really cool. Something that I've been thinking about a lot is just like, okay, we all understand animated films to be a big industrial process where there's a pipeline, it starts with the story people, and then it goes to the next set of technicians, and it sort of moves down a line. My thinking is, what if the movie were more like a novel, where you could work on all the parts of it at the same time, and you could change the ending or change the colors of something or change the character's name or do whatever in any order. My favorite thing about working on this was how open-ended parts of it were. Even things in the script, on the day of, always had question marks around them.

I think it's quite a risky thing to do. It's certainly not something that someone would give you a lot of money and let you run off with, but for me, it's like there have to be things in production that you don't know the answers to at the beginning. Otherwise, you're putting together Ikea furniture the whole time and just following the instructions that you've set for yourself. I think a lot of people like to be part of a Big Pipeline and do their one task. I love all animation, but I can't relate, and I was also never going to be able to make a movie that way. So my producer (Peisin Yang Lazo) and I, one thing we talked about a lot is that there are things we can't compete with Pixar on. They have the greatest emotional machine of all time. They have the greatest feather machine of all time. They have these particles and weather effects that we can never do. So, then it's like, well, there's stuff that I think we could do here that they wouldn't ever do. An audacious ending or a different approach to voice acting. It was like, let's lean into that stuff.

BS: You’ve talked a lot in other interviews about how this incredible cast of voice actors came about, but what I found so interesting is that despite being immediately identifiable as them, they still feel so specific. I’ve known a character like Grace Kuhlenschmidt’s Freckles or Joe Pera’s mini-golf owner. How did you build out the characters with them?

JG: I feel very lucky with this. I didn't have to direct anyone very much. One of the mandates, one of the only directives that we gave people when we sent out the script was: I'm not asking you to do a voice. I'm not asking you to develop a character. I'm asking you to be yourself. We cast people by listening to them in interviews and podcasts, and stuff like that. I just have to give props to Joe. I'm not sure what he did to access this character. I'm not sure if he did anything or if it just came naturally to him.

I think Grace was really incredible because it was a hard one to cast. The character on paper is very cruel and just kind of nasty. It's this sort of teenage boy who's just gone through a growth and has all this new power that he's really enjoying exercising over his friends. I was like, this has to be the most charming person in the world, or it's not going to work. I think I had seen a TikTok of Grace doing this teenager thing, and she came in and did, and she has the ability to just make anything funny. It's that special comic thing where it's like she's not thinking of jokes, she's just saying things in a funny way. That is magic.

BS: The specificity is what hit me most because these feel like people that could exist in any small town. I know this is set in Florida, but I knew so many people like this in Pittsburgh, which is where you’re living now. I mean, Freckles being a small-town rapper is half of the white guys I knew. <laugh>

JG: Well, it's funny that you mentioned that because Freckles is very much a kind of Pittsburgh character. That's one you would see in McKees Rocks or something. Or when I was living in Lawrenceville, there was just a group of kids who lived around the corner from me. It was sort of a floating group of eight or nine kids, but there were always four of them. They were coming and going. I don’t know if they were staying with their grandparents or what. But yeah, I watched them grow up over the pandemic and chat with them sometimes, and they'd be walking dogs and stuff. Some of the characters are based on people I know. Others were just me drawing the worst elements of myself out and spreading them evenly across each character. I have been Freckles at many points.

As I was writing characters, it really did help to bring the cast in and say, if someone's going to come in and do our voice recording, I need to write something for them that's worth their time and is more special than just delivering exposition. Sarah Sherman's character, for example, originally was just a neighbor character that had a couple of throwaway lines, and the thinking was, if she's going to come in to do this, let's really make it something juicy. So, it turned from this kind of nosy Christian neighbor to this John Waters character. That's such a good place for her to be.

*SPOILERS FOLLOW*

BS: This is getting into spoiler territory, but one of the more refreshing aspects of this is that you completely subvert expectations. Billy ending up with the single mother alien and father to all these weird alien children instead of with Rozebud is kind of lovely. How did you land on that?

JG: There was a feeling of acceleration when I was writing the movie, and the idea came to me the day before I sent the script to Tavi (Gevinson, who plays Glorba, the alien mother). The worm was originally very much a take me to your leader type thing, where they gave the speech that was like: “Billy, we watched you all week. We see how special you are. Thank you for taking care of Donut.” And then the aliens would leave, and he would sort of have the traditional ending of resuming his life slightly changed. Then the thought process shifted to: what if this alien character was kind of a blogger, blogging about her experiences on Earth? What if she were a flirting single mom? What if she hit on Billy? What if he actually saw it through? What would that be like? What if he actually was given a choice there that wasn't just a joke, but a real choice to change his life?

The diversion or the fake out of the love story with Rozebud is important for him to go through to get there because all through the movie, what he's really searching for is a person to be. He's sort of in love with Rozebud, but he also sort of wants to be her, and she loves that. I've been both of these people, and she loves being taller than him on the ladder or being the master of the domain at the Waffle House-type building. When Billy starts kind of seeing through her schtick, her fake leftist shtick, she basically turns on him. She ratchets it up all the way with this very flirtatious palm-reading thing and then twists the knife by saying she's in love with Freckles when she's obviously not. So I think Billy kind of needs to go through that devastating, heartbreaking girl next door crush to get to this place where he's kind of reset and willing to do something else.

*SPOILERS END*

BS: I also love how the aliens sound. You have this weird, distinct vocal pattern you’ve brought throughout your work. It reminded me a bit of the dolphin, your short, Dolphin Poem.

JG: Tavi was really down to do the alien stuff, and this was something where it was, again, it was nothing in the script. In the script, it's brackets, “alien noises,” and we tried a lot of just different mouth sounds, or seeing if we could do it like a language from the Sims. It ended up being more like talking with food in your mouth all the time, which I think thematically makes sense. Then it's this idea that you're just forcing air through a tube. So I think that pretty much works on its own. And then there are a hundred layers of filters in GarageBand, like chorus and flanger effects, just to give it a tingle.

BS: I like that it doesn’t end up being like The Minions. <laughs>

JG: Hey, I love the Minions! <laughs> The Minions are truly iconic to me. Dr. Dolphin kind of has a few in her laboratory in this.

BS: Hey, fair enough. <laughs> Well, as we wrap up, I have to ask about Pittsburgh. Spending my entire life there until this last year, I’ve never met anyone who picked up from a bigger city and moved there. What do you love about it?

JG: I think it's fantastic. I think it really comes down to quality of life. It is a place where you can have some time and space to yourself. I meet a lot of people who have a situation like you described earlier, where they are working artists. Pittsburgh is a city that presents a different way of living for an artist, where you can have a broader range of interests and meet a broader range of people who are not just your peers in your field. And it's beautiful about six months out of the year, it's really beautiful. Then you have your winters, which are good for hunkering down.

Boys Go To Jupiter is Now Playing in Select Theaters

-Brandon Streussnig

At the height of COVID lockdown, I was still working my janitorial job, perpetually freaked out that being outside would kill me, and spiralling into movies in a supply closet. The VOD section of Prime or VUDU became a haven for me, and I’d press play on almost anything. The vast majority was immediately forgotten, but for every ten bad movies, I’d stumble upon something that felt vital and new. Mitzi Peirone’s Braid was not only one of them but perhaps, right at the top of what was reinvigorating my love for cinema when it looked like nothing was ever going to be made again.

Braid, wherein two young women attempt to steal from their mentally unwell friend by playing the games that exist only in her mind, was an existential nightmare. Bright, fluorescent color, jagged and fractured cuts, and loopy performances from the leads, it was at once familiar yet unlike anything I’d ever seen. In a moment of indie filmmaking that feels solely in dialogue with the films and filmmakers before it, Mitzi Peirone’s vision felt like a breath of fresh air. A vision entirely unfraid to be something jarring, worming its way under your skin.

When you hear visionaries of the past discuss what they were drawing from, cinema is but one piece. Minds shaped by painting, literature, philosophy, and the wider culture created masterpieces that linger eternally. Now, many filmmaker soundbites cite those who came before with nothing beneath that. It’s created an independent landscape that feels more like a hollow feedback loop rather than a real attempt to move forward. Now, let’s be clear here, there’s a real distinction between honest independent cinema and what the larger voices claim to be independent. Peirone falls squarely into the former, a true hustler who financed her first film through smart investments by herself. Because of this, she only had herself to answer to, and as such, Braid looks, moves, and sounds unlike anything else.

I knew I’d be on board for anything Mitzi Peirone after Braid and her new film, Saint Clare, did not disappoint. Following a young girl, Clare (Bella Thorne), whose voices in her head call her to eradicate evil, she soon finds herself falling down a rabbit hole of trafficking and violence. Seeing the ghost of the one person who was ever truly kind to her (a delightful Frank Whaley) and drawing on her Catholic faith, Clare sees herself as Joan of Arc, a crusader fighting against the tide of the evil that men do. Adapted from a YA novel by Clare at 16 Don Roff, Peirone dispels cutesy ironic humor in favor of an achingly sincere look at what conditions might drive someone to choose violence. Even in a situation where she’s making a film for different masters, Peirone’s singular voice explodes through what could’ve been the one millionth ~self-aware~ revenge thriller. In her hands, Clare isn’t a wisecracking killer but instead a woman fighting through personal and external demons, played with wonderfully dry, full-bodied earnestness by Thorne. Dark forests alight in red pops of color, Peiorone creating a baroque atmosphere amidst the small-town, backwater violence.

A sensibility all her own, I’d been wanting to sit down with Mitzi for a bit now to open up just what inspires that swirling, psychedelic vision I’d taken to back when I was losing my own mind. Our conversation drops, assuming an influence, 90s thrillers to be exact, and finding instead that her touchpoints are much more disparate and exciting than that.

A winding, lovely talk on everything from philosophy to art to how she finds that drive to keep going in an industry to seeks to flatten voices. A true original and a joy to spend some time with, this is a fun one and deeply inspiring.

Brandon: I felt such a '90s influence while watching this. Specifically, jagged thrillers, like Freeway, Kalifornia, Poison Ivy… I could be completely off base, but I want to know, what were you looking at while making Saint Clare?

Mitzi Peirone: :It's so fascinating that you say that because I think that when you're making any type of art, specifically a film, because films can be so ripe with many references, many influences that go beyond filmmaking itself, eventually I think that the conscience of the director spills onto the screen, even subconsciously.

So I didn't actually think about '90s films. My main influences were Audition by Takashi Miike, and that's, I think, 1999 and '98. So still more late '90s. And when you say '90s, I think early '90s for some reason, I think Gregg Araki or True Romance. Besides Takashi Miike, I was influenced by A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by Ana Lily Amirpour, and a little bit by Scoop by Woody Allen. Similarly, investigative, a little quirky. There's a ghost following her, but there are also crude elements to it.

And then I thought about '70s Italian giallos. I think that the Black gloves, the mystery, the killer being a woman, and just that velvety, lurid '70s feel to it, specifically from Deep Red by Dario Argento. I think that those were the cinematic world that I was living in.

But then I'm from the '90s, so is Bella, and so is my DP, Luca Bazeli. I think we're somehow doomed to relive the '90s right now, a little bit. It's not just based on fashion trends. People are smoking cigarettes again. <laughs> I feel like there is a disillusioned, anarchic, punk rock, sleek, moody, "fuck you" feel, and also the impending doom of 2000, etc. The turn of the millennium.

I feel like right now we're feeling that a little bit. We feel doom and gloom creeping on us. Specifically our generation, because we were children at the time in the '90s, I feel like we are kind of re-embodying that spirit, that kind of disillusioned punk rock energy. The '90s are such a golden age for independent cinema, and this was a true, independent, scrappy, make-it-happen-no-matter-what film. So I do think that that edge that you speak of definitely came from that.

You touched on something I was going to ask later, but let’s dive into it: You said your inspirations, sort of have to come from outside of film. It can't just be related to film. I feel like is such a big problem right now with a lot of movies that I see made by people our age is that they're only in dialogue with the films that they watch, whereas the films that they watch were in dialogue with art and culture, and literature. I feel like you're so singular that you break out of that, and it feels like so much of your work is inspired by more than just cinema that it becomes uniquely your own. Can you talk a bit about that? Your images are so electric yet absolutely thoughtful. Where does the person who made Braid look like THAT come from?

It's a very bright observation, and it's something that I've said in interviews before, and I couldn't read the room of like, ‘oh, you think you're better than us?’ <laughs> I was like, ‘no!’ But I do believe that if you only watch movies as a filmmaker, you will probably end up making versions of other people's movies.

That famous line that I detest, frankly, when everybody quotes it, attributing it to Picasso, ‘The good artists copy, great artists steal.’ I think that it is misinterpreted. When you are fully imbuing yourself in history, opera, graphic novels, video games, you name it, when you're truly devouring all of these mediums and all of this art, I think that it becomes so intrinsically yours that when you quote it, when you reproduce it in your own work, you don't even notice. So it's so subtle, and to me, the art of actually stealing it, because when you steal something, you think it belongs to you, and that's why you take it.

That is, yes, all to say that I absolutely believe that you'll be stuck in a feedback loop if you only look at other films to infuse and inform your cinematic endeavors. I gravitate towards history, always have. Probably because I'm Italian, probably because my mom took me to museums at a very young age, and she made me fall in love with the enigma that every painting had within its frame. There's so much more to any painting that you may look at, as long as you take the time to learn about the artist and what kind of time they were living in, and what a grapefruit meant in the 1500s in Italy. It was a symbol of wealth. Would you know? No. You have to take the time to dig in and learn.

Because of that, composition, negative space, perspective, rule of thirds, all of that, it just became part of how I see things. I always loved drawing, and I always loved painting. One of my skills as a filmmaker is storyboarding by hand. I have to do it. I have to do it in a compulsive way. For Braid, I only storyboarded the most iconic shots where, it being my first film, I didn't want to say something that could have been misinterpreted by my department heads.

*Mitzi provided some of her hand-drawn storyboards for this piece*

And so that also helped. On the next one, I would love to print my storyboards and just have them laid out so that everybody knows what we're doing that day. It's like a call sheet but for idiots. <laughs> It's just images. I think it's important that everybody just has the same exact image in their head of what a shot needs to look like. Also, because things get crazy on set. Things get fast and furious. Suddenly, somebody's not there because they just tested positive for COVID. You've got to rethink everything. And I remember this quote by Kubrick that he said, "Filmmaking is like playing chess. It's like taking your time when an impulsive choice may be preferred." I don't think Kubrick ever made a film in 15 days ever, but I want to aspire to that state of mind.

So yes, art history, then opera. I love the opera, again, probably because I'm Italian. Moving to the United States, I realized how much privilege Italians are born with because every corner, every street corner is just, oh, here's this beautiful Baroque sculpture.

There’s history everywhere.

Beauty is everywhere. Everything should be sacrificed for beauty as long as that's preserved. I don’t think that’s a superficial take. To me, beauty can also be social justice. If you think about urban landscaping, if trees are on every street, then everybody's cooler in the summertime. So that's one way of marrying beauty with social justice, with making things great for everybody. And also great food. I love the fact that Italian food is so simple, and it should not be overpriced. A lot of staples of Italian food come from moments of hardship, of wars and famines, etc. And that's why it's so important to me, at least, that Italian food should be affordable to everybody. Good food should be affordable.

And so I think that because until I was 19, I lived in Italy, and I've just always lived in this world of privilege from an aesthetic and artistic standpoint. So art, history, opera, I read a lot….no, I read eagerly, slowly, imagining the scenes in my head, imagining the transitions, imagining the details. You're in New York, right?

Yup! Although, a very new New Yorker.

One of my favorite things about living in New York City is just listening to music and walking around Manhattan because it's insane how somehow you're hopping on the train last minute and the beat drops at the exact moment, the song that you're listening to, and then you're starting to cut music videos in your head. It's crazy. I just feel like walking around listening to music, and you're just training this muscle in your imagination. I think it's so important to daydream. You have to do it.

Lastly, I’m inspired by Japanese graphic novel “Deathnote” which was mind-blowing and life changing for me in high school, and still is. There are supernatural elements, an antihero as a protagonist followed by an amusing and very goth god of death that only he can see and hear… questions around ethics, the dichotomy between good and evil/right and wrong and how murky morality can be when warped by power and biases all went into Saint Clare.

This is why I immediately vibed with your work. I've always been the kind of person that’ll put headphones in and… when I have written scripts, which they've all been terrible by the way, but when I have written them, I always work backwards from the point of listening to music, imagining a scene that fits that song and trying to figure out how can I build something around that scene. That's just how my brain works, and it’s why your work feels so familiar to me.

I love that you mentioned opera, because I feel like your work has such a lack of self-consciousness around it. There's a real sincerity that comes with opera because it‘s so dramatic and bold. There's no irony around it. There’s no irony around your work either. It's very much of itself. It's not winking at itself. This new one's funny, but it's not making fun of itself the way so many films do.

The first time I gave a speech to intro a film, someone asked my boyfriend ‘Is this a bit?’ and he's like, ‘No, this is how she talks. This is Mitzi at eight in the morning, just sipping her coffee and being like, Mm, I love an overcast day in Los Angeles. It smells of opportunity.’ I don't know how else to be. This is how I talk to my dog. <laughs>

I feel myself embracing that sincerity the older I get. I feel like people are afraid to discuss their films or talk about the films they love out of a perceived pretentiousness.

I'm happy that we're having this conversation because I feel like whenever I'm like, oh, yeah, Braid was an existentialist piece, and then the Saint Clare also has Nihilist Nietzsche Eternal Return moments. People are like,' ‘oh...’ And I'm like, but that's the truth! And so this is refreshing to just be like, yeah, no, I love philosophy. It's not pretentious. It's great. It's therapy.

Working backwards a bit, can you tell me about how Bella came on board? I love the niche she’s carved out as not necessarily a screamqueen but more of a full-bodied, action performer.

Bella was the full package for this. I had become friends with her a couple of years prior because we were represented by the same manager, and there were a couple of other projects that we're supposed to work on, and they didn't come to fruition within the timeframe that we were giving ourselves, and so we moved on to other things. Clare specifically required, in my opinion, a lot from several standpoints. Physically, very demanding. Stunts, lots of physical action and carrying the entire film and being believable while you're pulling off these stunts.

*Slight spoilers follow*

I remember one time we're rehearsing the car stunt sequence, and she started driving the car with her foot, and that moment I was just like, ‘oh my God’, I would've never written that because you need somebody there to see it, etc. Bella was very physical, and at the same time, Clare demanded a great deal of psychological inner workings. She has several dissociative episodes. We play a lot with her paranoia because she's not just a cold killer. She does feel guilt. She does feel the ghost of the people that she kind of saw die, was maybe a little responsible for his death a little bit. That's why Bob kind of follows her because it's her conscience a little bit.

From a psychological standpoint, she had to undertake all of these moments of her fractured psyche, but also emotionally. Clare has to deal with grief. She has to deal with solitude. She has to deal with loneliness, rejection, with death. She has a relationship with death throughout the entire film and the impermanence of life. And at the same time, this feeling that this good thing that she thought she did should be kept secret forever.

The moment where her mom gives her that pep talk about, ‘Clare, you can never tell anybody what you did in the woods today.’ That moment is kind of like her antihero genesis, her inception moment, that moment that changed her forever. And to me, the fact that her own mother, her parental figure tells her that thing that you thought you did that was good, some people may not understand it. Not everybody will understand you. Not everybody will see you as a hero.

So that dichotomy of ‘I know what I did was right, but I understand that I'm up against institutions that may prosecute me for it. They may see me and judge me as guilty for doing something that I thought was right.’ That gave Clare the sense of loss of trust in institutions. Bella specifically, has always been extremely vocal for marginalized communities and queer rights, trans rights, feminists, etc. It made sense that she would become this vigilante character that had this very broad scope of yes, emotions and psychological inner workings, and also that she was very physical, very hands-on and believable doing so.

You also have a great ensemble here full of 90s staples. I know you said you weren’t consciously looking at that stuff but how I love how the cast kind of fits that mold a bit. How did you cast them?

It's such a great ensemble. The casting of Ryan Phillippe, Frank Whaley, and Rebecca De Mornay was very old-fashioned. Write the script. Write it to the best of your ability of what you think is true. Write every sentence with the same thought, whatever Hemingway said, ‘write the next truest sentence that you possibly can.’ I think the most beautiful thing about writing, the reason that I love literature or just any type of writing, philosophy or looking at any type of art is that it transcends time and space. And so suddenly you're connected with people that have passed away. You're connected with people that are on the other side of the world, and somebody can read something that you wrote and, fuck, they feel less alone. I just get really giddy thinking about that.

So they read the script and they loved it, and for all different reasons. Rebecca told me, ‘I don't like being bored when I read a script. I stop reading it.’ I'm like, ‘Sister, me too.’ And so she was like, ‘I found it very amusing and very intense. I just had never read anything like Saint Clare.’ Then she told me that she, herself , was infatuated a bit with Joan of Arc. Like how odd, how strange, how peculiar. Rebecca's fabulous. I've fallen in love with her over and over and over. I cannot say enough amazing things about her. Rebecca's an incredible, incredible person and incredible actor.

And Frank! Of course, I knew his filmography, so I was really nervous on the first day on set because we didn't really get to chat a lot ahead of the 15-day production. So when Frank got on set, I had no idea whether he was just taking a job or whether he was in it because he actually liked it. He was so incredibly nice. He came up to me, he's like, ‘I really like the script.’ I'm like…starstruck. It was great.

Frank just brought this incredible gravitas and vulnerability to the role. He really is the heart of the film. You can only write as well as you can, and then the actors take it all the way. And with Ryan, a '90s film, going back to this theme that we were talking earlier, he and I talked a lot about True Romance. Because of how incredibly believable Patricia Arquette in the fight scenes is, she's just so scrappy, dirty, there's no way she's going to make it. But then she's like, with the corkscrew, she's like... <mimics stabbing motion>

I love how raw and scrappy and real that scene felt. And that's something that Ryan and I talked about a few times on set.

That has to be so fulfilling, to have all of these people come up to you individually and tell you how much they connected with the script. To that point, there’s such a focus on Catholicism here. I’m assuming that having grown up in Italy, that’s something that was all around you. I was raised Catholic, long-lapsed, but all definitely in there.

Oh, 1000%. I went to Catholic school for the vast majority of my life. In Italy, I feel like it's a little chiller. We don't take the sacred scriptures as so literally. We're like, it's literature, there's metaphors. The bible had even said that the sun revolves around the earth when nobody here actually believed that. My parents didn't force me to go to church every weekend, but I guess we call ourselves Catholics. I like the idea of contemplating religion in the way that I contemplate philosophy, because I do think it's important to ask yourself questions and have a relationship with the beyond, whatever that may be. I find that fascinating.

That being said, specifically Catholicism, I think that because it's so ripe in imagery, there's no other religion that gets made fun of as much in horror movies. It's because we're so gaudy and over the top, and that's beautiful. The baroque, the drama, the symbolism, the martyrdom, the violence. Even within Christianity, if you go to a different church, which is something that I learned shooting Saint Clare. We shot in Louisville and I was like, ‘there's churches everywhere. We'll be fine.’ I enter and I'm like, ‘where are the statues? Where are the ornate things? Where's the painted fresco ceilings?’ And they're like, ‘no, we don't do it like that!’

The one church that was Catholic, they of course were like, ‘what's the film about?’ And I'm like, ‘it's called Saint Clare.’ They're like, ‘ah, that's very nice.’ But, I can't lie to this priest and tell him that we're not making a violent, maybe controversial for some Catholics, movie. So far I haven't heard that backlash yet. Somebody did say in a comment section, because in Bella's first shot, she's laying upside down on her bed. They're like, ‘Upside down cross!’ I knew that one person was going to say that, but as a matter of fact, that is a reference to the martyrdom of St. Peter. That's the reference there. They wanted to just crucify him, and he was like, ‘Nah, nah, nah, that's Jesus' thing. I need something else. I'm not worthy. Put me upside down.’ <laughs>

I find the idea of martyrs to be fascinating, objectively. I think it's crazy. I think it's crazy that somebody would die for a cause, that somebody would die for a belief. I was going to say I don't relate, but I'm like, I mean, filmmaking will take it out of you. I think that if you commit to a independent film fully, it will claim pieces of you, like your sanity, your wellbeing, your mental health, the time that you spend with your family. And I think that crew members relate to that also. So in this oblique way, I do like the idea of digging deeper into the idea of martyrdom, what it's like to want to live forever and be ready to die for a cause. It is fascinating. That infused Clare and it infused the aesthetics of the film. We played a lot with Renaissance paintings. I've been talking nonstop about this female painter from the 1500s, the female Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, speaking of going elsewhere for resources and influences.

She was this incredibly gifted painter. Her dad thought that she needed a mentor. The girl didn't need a mentor at 17, she was just as good as Caravaggio. And the mentor sexually assaulted her, and she called them out. But at the time, you wouldn't call out the person who assaulted you, you would just marry them or be quiet about it because then your reputation is tarnished. Artemisia was very courageous, and she decided to take him to court. She spent eight months getting tortured. Eventually she won, but she had to leave Rome because, again, the reputation thing. She was the first woman to join the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. All of this is to say that her art was heavily influenced by this moment. Specifically, if you want to look at Judith Slaying Holofernes, it's incredible. It's an incredible painting because you should put it next to the same theme, Judith Slaying Holofernes by Caravaggio. So the same subject painted by a woman and a man, specifically a woman who experienced violence.

The Caravaggio version, you have this tiny dainty lady just kind of holding the sword. It's a toothpick, and she's disgusted at the site of blood. And next to her, there's an old lady being like, ‘get on with it, cut his head off!’ And the Artemisia version is two strong women holding him down. You feel the difficulty of taking somebody's life. You feel the strain. You feel the violence and their faces aren't necessarily enthralled with it, but they're not disgusted either. It's just kind of like they look like two butchers. It's like, ‘we did what had to be done.’

As we start to wrap up, I feel like this conversation and how passionate you are in general answered this for me, but I still want to hear what you have to say. You hustle so much, you're such an entrepreneur. In the world of independent filmmaking, you are truly independent. It's well known with Braid, how you financed that movie. And then this is such an independent film, it's a scrappy shoot. You shot for 15 days. How do you keep that drive going? Especially when so many singular indie filmmakers are being scooped up to make IP?

I mean, I would love to get scooped up. If anybody out there is listening, I think I make an excellent Batgirl. <laughs>

No, but I waver like everybody else. I'm so passionate, but I waver. One of the things that I think about is the fact that a lot of artists, exceptional artists, don't get to live their dreams play out in real time. I was 26 when I made Braid. And despite the struggles that I endured right after, because I'm an immigrant, I got stuck in Italy. I didn't have a green card. Then I got back. And to be completely honest, because I had put so much of myself into Braid and into my career, my filmmaking, my cinema. At the end of 2021, it was two years that I wasn't working. I don't want to say that I was suicidal, but I was struggling to see a logic in my life if I wasn't making cinema. Again, not suicidal, but the worms were starting to tarnish my brain a little bit. And so in that moment, Clare came to me through my same producer from Braid, Ariel Elwes. And in a way, it saved me. It really did.

For me, the stakes are existential. It's as if I could go on not eating for only a certain amount of days, then eventually I’ve got to eat. So it’s kind of just this primal, existential necessity that really drives me. But also knowing, again, the fact that I am very privileged to be able to do this. Even the hardship is a privilege because I oftentimes think about specifically my grandma, and I'm in her room right now, and her name is Mitzi, and she passed away in 2015. She was an exquisite artist. She was self-taught, and she would draw beautifully, but she was stuck between two wars. And she was born at a time where women weren't really allowed to have careers that were artistic unless they had money already, and they could just do it on the side and not worry about selling their paintings or having a career doing it professionally. And so I think about her. Her, meaning anybody that maybe is in war-torn countries and they're not able to make art and they're not able to make cinema. That is something that I use to straighten myself up when I get a little insecure. I cannot undo who I am, this is just what I do.

Saint Clare is out in select theaters and available to rent on VOD.

As our world crumbles with each passing day, be it physical connection deteriorating, places we’ve held dear transforming overnight, or the ability to make ends meet beyond insurmountable, it’s easy to look to a natural disaster to wash it all away.

This is how we find a collection of disconnected, transient people weathering an impending hurricane in Alexandra Simpson’s debut feature, No Sleep Till. Set in a small Florida beach town, No Sleep Till follows four different people as they navigate their loneliness. With their town evacuating, a young girl spends her time lazily floating in the pool, two young men make a break for a new life in Philly, and a drifting storm chaser rolls in hoping to catch magic. Beneath their stories lies a disaffected malaise, yet an intense yearning for a time they’ll never get back.

Growing up in France but spending her summers in Florida, Simpson’s small-town America is a romantic fantasia built from her own nostalgic memories. Sound is her greatest landscape, waves of radio chatter and ambient, dissonant echoes lacing every scene. She evokes an America immediately familiar to anyone who’s spent long, listless nights wandering through backyards and side streets. Shot by Sylvian Froidevaux, space and time seem to freeze as these four lost souls look to the imminent hurricane to wash away their malaise.

Produced by Tyler Taormina through his Omnes Films label, No Sleep Till fits right alongside their other recent nostalgic elegies, Eephus (dir. Carson Lund) and Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (dir. Taormina). Still, Simpson makes a singular impression, her hazy memories informed by a yearning distance, allowing for something a touch poisonous to seep through. Those dreamy, good vibes of yesteryear, sprinkled with a melancholic frustration at a town and its people being forgotten by time and capital. A major debut, one whose silences are louder than words, whose images resonate long past fading to black.

Ahead of its theatrical premiere, I sat down with Simpson and Taormina at Metrograph for a fulfilling discussion on liminal spaces, wistful nostalgia, and finding miracles within sound.

Brandon Streussnig: Sound is so omnipresent in both of your works. Especially in this movie, but also in the films that you produce, too, Tyler. The constant radio chatter, outdoor ambiance, dissonant conversation — How do you account for those sonic textures when scripting?

Alexandra Simpson: I'd say it’s all, almost always, in the script. Specifically because in this case, a lot of the sounds that are in the film are related to memories that are then related to places. Since it's a film based on a place, it was a place and a sound, always. So each scene is introduced by the place and the sound. For example, the opening scene with the radio is a weather forecast. It's constantly playing in most restrooms, in any restaurant in that part of Jacksonville, so it's very specific memories and very specific nostalgia linked to these memories.

Then, what happens when you sort of draw from that, you think about, well, what is specific to Florida, like cicadas? We drew from that in the edit room to sort of create this dreaminess with the echo of these different songs, music, maybe suggest a nearby person — It's very suggestive, the use of the music, in those scenes. That's actually how Tyler and I knew that we would collaborate. We bonded immediately on sound. That was the first, like, "Okay. We could actually work together."

Tyler Taormina: Yeah, absolutely. I think that place is heavily emphasized in all of our works, and I realized that, more so than images, sound is the way in which we can live in a space, because one thing that I know Alex and I share in common, what we first bonded over, was the phenomenon of using the high and low pass frequency modifications to actually give yourself a miracle. It's suddenly shifting into another perspective in that same place, and what that does emotionally, what that does psychologically, and I think that the emotion found in soundspace is a huge part of No Sleep Till. It's a different movie entirely without that in mind.

Many of my favorite movies this year, including this one, make terrific use of second and third screens or archival footage. I think it’s such a great way to not only evoke memory, but also sort of engage with the inability to move on from memory. Can you talk a bit about the use of that here?

AS: It’s very much memory-driven, but also very specifically tied to the hurricane coming. I feel like the only real way to feel the threat before it actually comes is through these screens, which are news reports, weather reports. I feel like there's a sort of moment that happens before a storm of that importance, where we're all tuned to our screens and the sound of the news report. It's also a very American thing, because there are not as many screens in France and in Europe, like in bars or just public spaces like this. So again, it's a sort of fantasy-like association that I have to this place that brings me back to, "This is what I know of Florida."

Then, you have the other nature of third screens with the archives, and it's interesting because they came much later into the film. They really sort of crystallized the edit with the storm chaser character. I wasn't sure whether to use any of that at first, but it is extremely evocative of something that was there that's not there anymore. I mean, most of the time, he's seen with another person. In this case, it's his dad, and it’s archive footage. It's almost like we only witness him waiting, and it's only through the archives that we get what he's pursuing and why. It’s a sort of bigger-than-life sentiment, and the fact that it's given to us through this very deteriorated kind of medium is very haunting.

The film is sort of an ode to the erasure of communal spaces. I feel like, especially for young people, those are just going away. I mean, the swimming pool is obviously one of the last of them. Waffle House, or any other diner, is one of the only places where you can just go sit and bullshit all night with no real plan. Those really stood out to me and made me remember what it was like to be that age. What locations, in that sense, were a must for you?

Well, you cited two of the "musts." I mean, I love what you're saying, it's really on point. With the swimming pool, I learned how to swim there, and Waffle House, it's just such a staple of Florida. It's interesting that you say that it's the sort of communal places where it's still okay to gather and chat, because a lot of the film is about the discomfort of people with their community or their neighbors, and the sort of difficulty to even connect with anyone. And so, even within these communal spaces, they very tenderly and fragilely take over, I still do feel this unease that comes with the alienation of these characters.

I've said before, but I was very inspired by Raymond Carver novels when I was writing the script, and everywhere we go in this film, you're always followed with that unease, and even in these places that are supposed to be occupied by anybody at any time, there still is an uneasiness to even be there in the first place, especially in the middle of the night. It's almost as if it weren't permitted, and it's a very secretive outing for most of these characters that come out.

We really only see these places from the outside. The Waffle House, the house party—

AS: My dad’s house!

Oh wow, it’s a great house! Incredible shot in the film. I like that we only see those communal places, sort of from a distance. Then, when we are allowed into the party, it’s so claustrophobic compared to the openness of the rest of the film. Can you tell me a bit about the blocking of the film?

AS: I remember that one of the things that I told Tyler was that I would want to make this film about people watching people. About this sort of longing for connection, but that's out of reach for them. So, I think the distance, if it's not somebody looking at them, suggests that we, as the audience, are longing for this group, for this individual; we're longing for a connection that we're not getting.

In terms of how we shot, we get more intimate when we’re in the cars or when we’re with June (Brynne Hofbauer) a little later in the night. But whenever it's these sort of solitary scenes, for example, the scene with the storm chaser in the parking lot, and the BMX guy doing this trick in the background, and this woman coming out — it’s like we're sniffing each other and we're not allowed to actually come together, but we're longing for it. So, the distance is crucial, and I don't even know if it was a super conscious decision. It felt more intuitive when we were writing the scenes to sort of picture them that way.

What sort of touchpoints were you looking at when you were creating these images? I only ask because there are so many shots here that feel of a piece with classic Americana photographers. I was reminded, just a bit, of when I spoke to Gia Coppola earlier this year and she talked a lot about Lisa Eisner’s work informing The Last Showgirl. You capture an America that so few have.

AS: I was mostly looking at films, but very photographically-tailored films. Toute une nuit by Chantal Akerman was a big reference, and I mention it because it's specifically a big reference for that one scene in the parking lot with the storm chaser from Phoenix. I remember we were also looking at images from The Headless Woman by Lucrecia Martel. Then, there's a slow-mo shot that's just sort of the unclearness of time when she's at the souvenir shop, and you see the people on their bicycles, and that was inspired by Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park. We were sort of crafting the language with a list of five to six films that we were constantly going back to.

Oh! And of course, Claire Denis was the main influence. I remember I was telling the DP, "I want to feel close to these characters and still feel that they're far away from us," and showed him a scene from Nénette et Boni. Then he said, "Okay. Then, we need to use this type of lens, which we don't have." <Laughs>

So, that's how we would communicate. It would be through scenes and images, because I wouldn't know how to speak about it otherwise.

You mentioned Chantal Akerman, and that sort of unlocked something for me. My favorite film of hers is Hotel Monterey, and it feels so much of a piece with both of your works, Alexandra and Tyler, just in how it visualizes liminal space. I know you can only answer for yourselves, but what do you think draws us to these spaces that feel so haunted by memory or transcience? I feel like the whole liminilality obsession is one our generation in particular has latched onto.

TT: To some degree, it has to be the internet. We have a self-consciousness about our very nuanced but lived experiences through a sort of form of communication that was not there before. I don't think that people would've been interested in the same sort of shared, hyper-specific, nostalgic things in a time when they couldn't quite see someone place it in such a way for everyone to chime in and agree with. So I think it is a product of this time, but of course, I mean, we are watching our world change, at this point, every year. I'm developing a film that takes place over 25 years, and it makes me realize how, when you see a crowded, fast food restaurant or something like that, you think, "Oh. Are we in the 90s? What is this?" All these people are together, so we are watching our relationship with, specifically, third spaces change now. Even second spaces are on the chopping block, which is crazy. So, I think that these two things together make a lot of sense.

There’s a romanticization of the Small American Town in No Sleep Till that feels almost like fantasy. Alexandra, you grew up predominantly in France. How did that inform your view of America?

AS: I mean, every time I'd go back, which was mainly in the summers, the excitement was always seeing the Waffle House, for example, or seeing these specific places that aren't a huge deal to anyone, really. I feel the main reason for making the film is sort of testifying for a place that's disappearing, and I think that it has to do with my father constantly telling us it is going to disappear. It's a very vulnerable place, but also because mass-modernization is rising. You're seeing so many of these very typical, wooden, Florida homes get torn down and rebuilt for new McMansions. I think that, even more than my father, I have the nostalgia of the old Florida, like, "No, but what was the old Florida like?"

I think it's so typical that a younger generation, the one that has not lived in a place as long is going to be the one who says, "No, but look at the way it was before," and so I was really going for locations that already inherently have this sort of decaying quality because they are fragile, they are precarious in their own existence.

Also, going back to liminal spaces, I feel like I was projecting a lot. You see a space that feels worn out. There's so much fantasy that starts there, and I love that in the film, you don't ever go there, but you feel it. I mean, you feel characters discovering spaces and they spend time in these spaces, and you feel that they project, but it's not given to you. It's something that you're free to navigate within.

When you're back in these places and you're making this film, and trying to recapture your memories of it, was there ever a sense where you like, "Whoa, I am here again"? I think time travel is the wrong word, but there’s such a surreal quality to the film. Did that ever happen for you while making it?

AS: Yeah, so much. I think it's not even just in the process of making it. It's really anytime I step foot back there. I'm like, "Whoa." It's very powerful, actually, and I don't think there's any other place in the world where I feel this much magic, and I usually think, "Oh, it's so beautiful. The colors are so beautiful," but it's completely inherent to the nostalgia that I associate with it. There were moments, just filming in the house, as I said, that house where they're partying at my dad's house, sort of re-creating new memories in a place that is already so loaded, is very interesting. Then, going back there after the shoot, and sort of witnessing how this shoot has temporarily replaced the older memories, is very disorienting, actually. It's kind of strange and a little anxiety-inducing, because it's so magical to have these childlike associations that I don't want to lose. I even said to Tyler the other day, sometimes I wonder if I should be living in the United States, if I'm going to be making films in the United States, because I want to keep the magic of returning to it.

I worry about that all the time. I always wonder what I'm losing precious childhood memories when I'm putting so much into my brain every day. I'll read something so stupid and just think, "Did I lose a memory with my grandmother after reading that?"

AS: Yeah. I totally relate to that. It's like fleeting memories and just trying to hang on to them.

Speaking to that, especially the relationship between the two younger men, it made me think a lot about my best friend whom I haven't talked to… in god, it's probably been over 10 years now. All I could think about were those nights where you just sit around and talk to each other on a stoop somewhere because you don't want to go home. You're younger, and you just want to be out all night and be out with your friend. Then, one day, that was the last time I ever did that. I didn't know that at the time, but I just never saw him again. It really affected me. How did you know, "That's enough. We don't need to show what happens next" when it comes to where we leave some of these people?

AS: Well, first of all, I'm really happy to hear you react super-sensitively to that, because it very much is the sort of end of a friendship. In terms of dialogue, we were very careful not to ever psychologize their dynamic, and so this casualness had to be the casualness of friends who have spent so much time together, but the time that they’ve spent is not telling of anything else. And, there are these moments of fragility that sort of start rising in the film. And I remember when we were talking about the end of the characters with Tyler, theirs was really the most, "Where do we leave it?" It was very challenging. I remember the three-point turn came about, but there were a lot of questions that came with it.

To this day, when people see it, there's a big mystery around, where do they go? Do they go back, or do they continue? I did not intend for that mystery, and it's so beautiful that whoever wants to have this friendship survive will be like, "Oh, it's so beautiful. You kept characters that go all the way," and then others find it so heartbreaking. We really had a hard time saying, "Okay. This is the very end." I think we finalized the script two weeks before the crew came to shoot. Then, during the edit, you do make choices of, “Are we going back to this person or not?” I mean, we work pretty close to the script, but just subtle choices of what exactly happens to people, not just the main characters, but also the passing characters.

As we wrap up, I think there's such a misconception about what independent film is, especially in the United States. But Tyler, you're kind of creating this whole little world of great, American, independent film. What draws you to the projects you attach yourself to that aren't your own with Omnes Films?

TT: Well, I should say I certainly do not act alone. I work with my best friends, and we call ourselves Omnes Films because it's advantageous in the branding, but I decide to work with the people that I love. They tell me their ideas, and I say, "We're going to do that," even though last week I said, "I'm never producing again." <laughs>

So, it is out of a love of cinema, and I surround myself with people who have beautiful hearts and minds that really make me hungry to actualize their dreams, so that's a big part of it. I don't ever search for new projects, and I don't like when people come up to me with projects, too, but if I find that a friend is working on something that I thought the world needed to see, I want to make that. I kind of feel like cinema is in a very good place and in a precious one at the same time, somehow. In that regard, I feel like every brilliant idea and every intuitive mind, like Alex’s, needs to be lifted up to everyone.

No Sleep Till opens at Metrograph today, Friday, 7/18, and will be streaming on Metrograph at Home on Sunday, 7/20, for a limited engagement. It will expand at a later date.

Two years into the ongoing genocide of Palestine by Israel, enabled by the United States, it can feel helpless trying to understand just how to engage with it meaningfully or even help at all. As we take in horrifying footage, be it on the news or in documentaries, an image of Palestine emerges: A country left in ruins, a people erased. While that is, of course, horrendously accurate with each passing day, it leaves out a Palestine and its people that was, and are, a thriving community full of hopes, dreams, passions, artistic pursuits, love, and everything else that makes us human. It flattens the image into a digestible cause, one easy to empathize with, but removes the context and history of a people who have lived there for centuries. We shouldn’t need to see death and destruction to find the common ground that exists all around us. One way to do that is by engaging in art created by Palestinians.

Palestine has a rich, textured history in film from Mustafa Abu Ali and his cinema as protest, all the way to women like Susan Yousef and her modern masterpiece, Habibbi, cinema flourishes in the region and always has. Continuning that legacy is Palestinian-American filmmaker Reem Jubran with her stunning new short Don’t Be Long, Little Bird.

At a crossroads in life, Rima (Banna Bazzarie), finds herself transported from a quiet picnic with her mother (Clara Khoury) into 1930s Palestine, brought face-to-face with her great-grandmother. As she comes to understand her familial history, Rima’s path in life becomes much clearer, with all signs pointing to a return to her homeland.

Shot in California and Palestine, Don’t Be Long, Little Bird isn’t simply a time-traveling fairy tale wherein a young woman comes of age. The film is an act of protest in the face of oppression. It’s a filmmaker expressly embracing her roots on screen, threading her reality as an American and Palestinian. While we see one vision of Palestine presented to us by mainstream media, Jubran presents the country she knows with the people who have shaped her. Three generations of Palestinian women get to share the screen in some capacity, simply existing as people, all set against the backdrop that is the beauty of Palestine. It’s a film that shows that you don’t need to depict pain and suffering to elicit empathy and understanding. The most powerful messages of resistance are often those where people simply exist as people, in the face of forces seeking to remove them. Living, thriving within their joy.

Beyond what the film means in the macro, as cinema, it’s a stunner. Gorgeous and colorful, DP Gionatan Tecle’s compositions are spellbinding. The fantastical elements are approached with a delicate, unshowy hand by Jubran. It’s refreshing to see such confidence in this kind of material. A lesser filmmaker might spend far too long explaining the how and why of the time-travel. Here, we’re trusted to follow along with Rima as she puts the pieces together herself. This is only Jubran’s second short, but her hand is as sure as anyone's. It’s a remarkable work.

I recently sat down with Jubran upon the release of Don’t Be Long, Little Bird. We spoke about the film, how it came to her, the magic catharsis of shooting in Palestine, and her desire to see less grieving from Western supporters of the Palestinian cause and more action.

You can view the film via Focus Features’ YouTube channel for free, here. After you finish (watch through the credits, always!), come back here for a great conversation with Reem Jubran. She’s the real deal, and I expect to see so much more of her in the years to come.

What immediately hit me while watching the film was, and I'm sure it was something that you had been working on for a very long time but how have the last almost two years affected the film in your mind?

Reem Jubran: Well, to clarify, I shot the film six months before the genocide started. I was like, I want to contribute and participate with my people over there, people who are at my level, fellow students, as much as possible. I felt like I had already had my Hollywood experience, even though it doesn't work like that. I was hoping to have a different experience, so it affected it in my plans. Mentally, I was in post-production in Los Angeles, editing the film while experiencing the live stream of the genocide. Everything was delayed. For six months, I didn't really do much, maybe it was four to six months, just kind of not doing much work. Life was kind of on hold for a bit there.

As editing started to pick up the pace, and we were hitting really great milestones, it really just felt like a refuge. Every time I'd go to the editing suite on campus at UCLA, it was just a day of disconnecting from the news. It was a day of disconnecting from everything. It was like I was escaping into the movie just as the character was escaping into her world of Palestine. Every time I watched the film, every session, my editor and I were just emotional and in tears. Tears went into this movie. Anyways, we were safe, but yeah, it was emotionally loaded. It was emotionally heavy and already is an emotional story.

I felt like I was escaping and connecting to Palestine every time we were in the editing suite versus what I think other people's natural reaction, which is to kind of disconnect maybe from the Palestine that they knew, because part of what we've been going through as Palestinians the past two years is mourning the version of Palestine that we knew. There's no going back now, whether it's Gaza or the West Bank and even 48 territories, nothing is the same, and physically, emotionally, people-wise. In a way, I was like, it was my last hold on to what I knew.

I don't think many Westerners get to see many films shot in Palestine. It made me think a lot about the way Western media depicts Palestine in a certain way, in a very harsh way, to be generous. What did it mean to you to be able to show Palestine as it actually is and how you know it?

Yeah, that's a great question. This was kind of like for me, as a first generation, born in the U.S., this was my coming out story in a way. An identity story, the Palestinian-American identity. There are so many of us out here. Coming out with this story, combining the two worlds, combining the two stories, my story, my grandmother's story, in the film it's my great-grandmother, but bringing this story to light, the Palestinian-American who returns to Palestine — redirected to Palestine — that's who I am. That is what happened to me at age 17. The story is based on me begging to my mom and my sisters, “I want to go to Ecuador.” I had gotten into this program, and they were like, "Hell no. You're going nowhere." <laughs> The quote from the film is literally what my eldest sister said. She's like, "Go help your own people first." It turned out that they helped me when I went at age 17.

This film, in many ways, is telling my story about who I am as a Palestinian-American in a way that isn't trying to pretend that I'm not American. I have written many scripts that take place in Palestine from a Palestinian woman's perspective in Palestine, but none of them happened. None of them were shot. I'm happy they weren't because it was important for me to explore who I am and share that with the world first, since so few of us have a voice in this industry. I'm happy and I'm proud to bring this story to the American audience so that they know that we're here, so that they have a new perspective of what Palestine looks like, what it feels like, what it sounds like, what the women are like. That is the most important to me. They may not see how it's connected to social justice on the surface, but at its core, this film is a form of resisting erasure. I'm happy that it does that.

Yeah, there are so few Palestinian narratives in Western media at all; existing is absolutely an act of resistance. You're just showing a couple of women connecting, and there’s something so lovely about that, where it's just an everyday story. It could exist anywhere, but it’s so important that it’s Palestine. What’s something you wish people, specifically “well-meaning” people, understood about Palestine that isn’t talked about enough?

Oh, where do we begin? <laughs>

Anywhere you want! <laughs> It’s such a loaded question, we can connect it to the film if you’d like.

Maybe because it is a huge question. We can connect it back. There are so many things that Westerners need to realize in general towards the whole world, and I think Palestine is just a fraction of that. I think that, and this does connect to the movie, I wish that people knew how much rich history and culture emerged from Palestine. This is connected to the wider issue in the U.S. education system that I'm sure you're very aware of. <laughs>

Oh yeah.

We missed out on a lot down here in school. <laughs> With the film, and going hand in hand with your question, is that I want people to know that we exist, that we have been existing. I can trace back my lineage, my paternal lineage on both sides, for generations just by how names are passed down. We don't have to explain to anyone that we exist because we know, and it shows in our language, it shows in our embroidery, it shows in our cuisine, it shows in our music.

In a way, the film and what my message to the world and my hope is, we don't have to justify our existence to anyone. I think the film does that by not being overtly Palestinian in a way that Westerners are used to seeing, whether it's through Palestinian media or Palestinian depictions. That being said, the film also is not what I would say the U.S. is used to seeing, which is a lot of documentary realism, things that are happening in real time in Palestine right now, whereas mine may seem like this airy fairy romanticized thing. No, it's not. It's not romanticizing reality. I'm recreating the past in order to understand it.

Well, I think that’s important. Western media seems to only be able to show Palestine as one thing. It’s like we need a harrowing documentary or news footage to find our empathy, and it shouldn’t be the case. There’s something so important that this is not only proudly Palestinian but proudly full of life. Again, it’s just women connecting and living. To that point, how did you cast them?

The main character, who played Rima, is a Palestinian American non-actor. I cast her because of her connection to the story. She's actually one of my really good friends. I saw how natural she was and cast her. I did put a call-out, and unfortunately, I didn't find any. The pool of Palestinian actors is so small in the U.S., and I wanted to find someone who exhibits the personality of a very headstrong, kind of bratty, stuck in the high school mentality that we all were in. She also speaks Arabic and English. Those were literally my criteria because of where I was at. Banna, her name is Banna Bazzarie. From the get-go, she was working with me on creative development with the film just for fun. The time travel element was her idea. I was like, "Okay, I have two timelines and they're going to happen at the same time, and we're going to jump, and it's going to be really complex." She was like, "Reem, what if she just time-travels?" She's an amazing collaborator in so many ways. She held the American identity with a lot of pride for me.

Then you have Clara Khoury, who is actually a very seasoned actress from Palestine, but has been based in the U.S. for 10 years. She kind of had a hiatus from acting, and now she's leading award-winning Palestinian films. She's back at it. My film was her return back into cinema, and I was very proud of working with her.

That’s incredible.

Yeah! She's amazing. She's known for The Syrian Bride. She's amazing. Her being seasoned really helped tie the trinity of the Palestinian mother, daughter, grandmother lineage together. Then the great-grandmother who meets Rima in Palestine was played by Muna Basha, and she has a theater background in Palestine. Very talented as well, but not so credited in cinema. I was very happy to find talented women.

It’s sort of amazing that you naturally found these three women from extremely different walks of life to play three women onscreen, all representing women in vastly different stages of their lives.

Kind of accurately, yeah, naturally and accurately. Banna's first generation, born in the U.S.. Clara has been in the U.S. for more than 10 years. She's a Palestinian-American mom. She has two kids who were born in the U.S.. She is raising a ten-year-old girl in the U.S., and dealing with that, it's heavy, and it's what I'm a product of as well. It’s all connected.

Who were some of the filmmakers who have influenced you, not only on the film but in general?

Well, I have been heavily influenced by Palestinian cinema since I was 15 years old, namely Annemarie Jacir and Elia Suleiman. My aunt's the founder of the Arab Film Festival. My sister, when I was 15, was the director of it. She introduced me to Arab Cinema in general. I was mind blown when I saw Salt of the Sea by Annemarie Jacir, because it's about a Palestinian-American who returns to Palestine for the first time and demands what's rightfully hers. I ended up working for Annemarie Jacir on her second to last feature. I had a really great film education from Palestinian directors. I was definitely influenced by Annemarie, by her boldness and her storytelling. Then Elia Suleiman and his authorship and his style of filmmaking. I felt like he really knows how to paint a picture. Outside of Palestinian filmmakers, I would say The Fall by Tarsem is one of my most influential films since I was a kid.

I LOVE that movie.

Yeah! It's just so complex. I just love complexity. I love confusion. I love less-is-more sort of stuff. I love reflexivity in cinema. I love stories within a story, and I think that's what I'm trying to do here in a very, I don't know, simplified way. Yeah, many angles to my influence, but I also am very influenced by Italian neorealism. I love how they use non-actors on location, stories with an underlying political message, but not overtly.

It's interesting how much your film, just by you telling me, does reflect all of those different influences. You're in a long line of Palestinian women filmmakers. I mean, you mentioned Annemarie, and then there's also Susan Youssef. I mean, it's so cool that you can feel that influence in your film while still very much being its own thing. I also like that you mentioned Tarsem because there is that fantastical element in your film of just traveling without explaining how it happened or why it happened. You don't even see it happen, it's that she takes a step, and she's in the past. I appreciate that there’s no over-explanation.

Yeah, I was happy to as well. I personally like movies that I have to work for that I have to watch multiple times and solve a puzzle. I'm going to do the same in mine.

You said that the first time you went to Palestine was at 17, so I know going back to shoot wasn’t your first visit, but what was it like staging a production there?

It was a dream come true. I am not even kidding. It was so fun. It was awesome because I had been going back and forth for a long time now, 14 years since I was 17, and two of those years I lived there working on other people's films. That's when I went to film school. I was like, “bye, I'm going to go make my own movies!” Coming back, I was like, “finally,” but also I was happy and I was fulfilled because I had worked really hard to get to that point. I had paid my dues in Palestine. I had paid my dues in Hollywood in terms of production experience. I felt very confident in my team. I felt very confident in the film and what we were doing.

Also, there was a very spiritual experience with the whole film kind of imitating life, and life imitating the film. There were many instances where I was like, this feels like the movie, and it's happening in real life, what is happening? I was like, “ancestors, what's up?” I was like, “I'm going crazy.” It was beautiful. I loved it. I loved how I felt like this constant feeling of “this is supposed to happen.” All odds are against me, it's a student film, I'm emptying the pockets of my family members. I had five people come from the U.S. to help me. The village showed up, and the pressure was on, but I was like, I'm not afraid because this is supposed to happen, and it did, and it was awesome. It was epic. It was an epic three full days and then one half day in another location. Yeah, it was awesome. I'm excited for more.

This is a much harder question, but having worked with so many people there, friends, family, are they ok now? Relatively speaking, of course. Have you been able to keep up with them?

They're all whole, they are okay. Everyone is thankfully safe and sound at the moment. There are some than others who have less privilege than others. I'm always, always staying in touch thanks to social media. A lot of them are also young filmmakers trying to get their work out there. I intend to always be available to them to support them in any way possible. Yeah, I mean, they live under occupation. Their life is limited. Life sucks in that sense, but they do a lot of amazing work in spite of all of that.

As we wrap up, I hate the question of “what do you want people to take away from your film?” because I think that’s obvious. So instead, I’ll ask, what do you want to see more of in terms of speaking out about the genocide, that you’re not seeing enough of?

I think people should use their talents and their skills to create actions. Right now, yes, people need money, and everyone who has the means should not stop donating, of course, to those in need in Gaza and the West Bank, as land is constantly being annexed, and people's lives are always at risk. If I, as the Palestinian, have hope and have energy to create events using my film to raise money to spread culture, so can non-Palestinians.

I think that people have to kind of shift their perspective of, "Oh, well, it's far, I can't do anything." I think people need to take control over their lives in many ways and work on their community, work on community building, work on using their arts, their talents, their skills, whether it's pottery or food or gardening or farming, whatever it may be, create something and connect with those around you. We live in a world where in the United States where connections and relationships and everything is starting to slowly diminish due to controlling of the masses, due to technology, due to AI. Then we have an example of that physically happening in Palestine. If we can all just get on the same level and do something actionable, no more grieving, we don't need vigils; we need action. That's what I say.

*Since recording this interview, Reem reached out to me to update that Palestinian Unit crew member, Malik Alhamamra, was arrested by occupying forces on June 11, 2025. His status is unknown as of this time.*

Nobody has perfected the art of rising, falling, and reinvention like Sylvester Stallone. Despite building himself from obscurity as the lovable Rocky Balboa, it’s the falling that Stallone thrives in. It’s those underdogs like Rocky, John Rambo, or Freddy Heflin in Copland who Stallone resonates with the most. As Rocky and Rambo became larger-than-life icons side-by-side with their star, the ability to relate to them became a struggle. We don’t often look to roided out freaks of nature as reflections of ourselves, but as fun as it is to see Arnold or Dolph crack skulls, Stallone’s superpower is those sad sack, puppy dog eyes. You can’t help but see a bit of yourself in this schlub. It’s almost as if you just put on a little bit of muscle, you, too, might be able to save the day. Or go down swinging.

By 1989, Stallone had largely given up on any pretense of being the everyman. Even when squaring off against the perfect specimen, Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV, the sense of any real danger was long gone. Rambo was no longer the disassociating PTSD victim trying to make sense of it all. In the Reagan 80s, he was a globetrotting merc mindlessly gunning down foreign boogeymen. Don’t be mistaken, Sly’s movies in this period were indisputable bangers, Cobra’s an action masterpiece, but the bloat was starting to set in. It wouldn’t happen for another half-decade or so but Stallone’s first fall was imminent. Taking a bird’s eye view of his career, one almost wonders if he was sensing it too, because sandwiched in between these high-octane, muscled-up schlock is John Flynn’s Lock Up.

Lock Up reads like a typical Stallone action joint. Model prisoner Frank Leone is six months from being released when, in the middle of the night, he’s violently transferred to a supermax prison run by the fascistic Warden Drumgoole (Donald Sutherland). Stemming from a shared history between the two (Leone escaped Drumgoole’s previous prison and left him in disgrace), the Warden vows to make Leone’s final six months a living hell. You’d be forgiven for assuming Stallone would spend the next 90 minutes fighting his way through goons and guards with a setup like that. With a hulking Sonny Landham (Billy in Predator) threatening to crack his skull at every turn, the threat of tipping into mayhem is omnipresent. Lock Up, however, is a shockingly quiet, often sweet film that feels wholly at odds with Stallone’s cultural presence as the 80s rolled into the 90s.

Frank is a family man, a man of honor and despite being built like a brick shithouse, he’s not too keen on getting into scraps. More akin to Stallone’s finest creation, Rocky, Frank prefers to keep it unassuming. Nose to the grindstone, he does what he needs to do to get by. Even when his last six months in the clink are thrown into disarray and he’s given what Drumgoole calls a “guided tour” of hell, he has no desire to rock the boat. Of course, when he’s at wits’ end, he explodes into violence, but even still, this isn’t the gun-toting, by any means necessary, justice Stallone the world had become accustomed to. His brand of vengeance isn’t through killing, not really. Marion Cobretti would’ve taken Drumgoole’s head clean off and looked great doing it. Frank, via a much softer Stallone, only wants to get into Drumgoole’s head. To let him know he’s won. What makes their final confrontation so jarring, Frank screaming through saliva, threatening to pull the lever on the electric chair and burn Drumgoole alive, is that his performance has completely erased our presupposed idea of Stallone. Years and years of violence should’ve prepared us for a Stallone who has no qualms about roasting this pencil-pushing psychopath to a crisp. It’s remarkable, then, that over the previous 90 minutes, Stallone buries all of that and convinces you that he’s a man incapable of this kind of horror. You’ve become so attached to kindly, goodhearted Frank that even though he’s been pushed to his limit through unspeakable torture in this hellhole, you can’t bear seeing him become the monster Drumgoole says he is. So much so that it’s a relief when it’s all revealed as a bluff to get a confession of guilt and put this sadist behind bars.

While Stallone is doing, to that point, some of the best work of his career, a lion’s share of what makes this little curio standout is director John Flynn. Most famous for Out for Justice (One of Steven Seagal’s finest outings), Flynn is the kind of steady hand that could plug right into genre-adjacent fare and give it the gravitas it might miss elsewhere. With a litany of punchy titles to his name, like Scam or Protector, you always knew what you were getting with a Flynn picture superficially. It’s that earthy grit he imbues that you’d never expect diving in. Think of his best work, Rolling Thunder. At first glance, it’s nothing more than a revenge thriller, but in tandem with a dynamite Paul Schrader script, Flynn delivers a devastating and bleak look at a post-Vietnam America where disillusionment was the only game in town. The only way to “win” is to sink lower than the guy with a gun to your head. That’s Schrader’s bread and butter, but Flynn is of a similar ilk. Perhaps a more meat-and-potatoes ilk, but he’s equally fascinated by men of code, forced into untenable situations, and seeing how far he can dip them into the mud before breaking.

Stallone’s Frank Leone is that man with a code, and it takes everything in him not to break it. Flynn puts him through the ringer to the point that it would’ve been comical if it weren’t so sad. (Credit those puppy dog eyes on Stallone for always pulling at our heartstrings.) If anything is holding Lock Up back, it might just be this bizarre juxtaposition. By ‘89, the bleak existentialism Flynn was trading in with Thunder or 1973’s terrific The Outfit was far out of fashion. Audiences weren’t looking for moral ambiguity, they wanted hulking heroes doling out swift, clear-headed justice. Lock Up attempts to make bold statements about the fallacy of prison as rehabilitation, but every time it walks up to the line, it pulls back. Drumgoole’s guards are a pack of sadistic brutes, beating Frank at every turn and even threatening to rape his wife. But just as you’re starting to think we’re getting a statement on corruption from the top down, John Amos’s guard has a change of heart, and it turns out there were just a few bad apples.

That’s the trouble with attempting a more muted Stallone picture in the middle of his monster heights. Even when you can feel him trying to pull it back, and as Flynn weaves a subversive web, it was never going to escape the blunt force of its period. Tinkly score over memories of his wife, a cutesy montage of Sly and the jailhouse boys rebuilding a car, and a mentorship struck up with a younger prisoner. All torn apart at the expense of Frank’s psyche. Our underdog hero suffers so much devastation that there’s no reason he shouldn’t pull the lever and make Drumgoole ride the lightning. In 1974, that’s how Flynn ends this. In 1989? Not a chance. So what you’re left with is a Frankenstein’d prison picture that alternates between brutality and sentimentality, never quite finding the middle. Never letting Frank learn much about the kind of man he is. Because the man he was going in is the same man that comes out: a Goddamn Hero.

None of this is to say Lock Up doesn’t work. Far from it. It's still a John Flynn prison picture starring Sylvester Stallone. We only got one of those, and the one we got is wildly entertaining but never dares to truly ask the tough questions, only lightly tease them. Perhaps that was enough because while Stallone enjoyed that next half decade of gargantuan success, the fall was coming. Rocky V was met with series’ worst reviews, a string of awful comedies followed, and though Cliffhanger and Demolition Man offered major bright spots, Stallone felt cooked. For over ten years, he toiled in the dregs until he was forced to punch his way back to the top with Rocky Balboa. The lone bright spot in those ten years? 1997’s Copland. Featuring a career-best performance from our lovable brute (nothing to sneeze at when his costars are De Niro and Keitel), Copland is a twisting tale of police corruption where the only one not on the take is the quiet, unassuming chief of a small town’s police force, played by Sly. Nabbing him rave reviews, not just for his performance but for his willingness to explore parts of his persona we hadn’t seen, Copland feels unlike anything he’d been in until that point. That is, of course, if you let a gem like Lock Up slip through the sands of time. Make no mistake, the former is far better than the latter. Still, it’s an undeniable treat to see an on-top-of-the-world Stallone taking stock of his career, trying on the everyman shoes Rocky and Rambo had long since traded in and acting his enlarged heart out. Lock Up can’t help but be a product of its star’s moment, but it’s a fascinating object from a director with an inimitable point of view. If nothing else, seeing Sly rally the troops in the muddiest game of football ever played while Sonny Landham tries to knock his head off is a hell of a good time.

-Brandon Streussnig

Back in the halcyon days of the COVID lockdown, I was one of the “lucky” essential workers who kept going into work. I was thankful to still be receiving a paycheck, of course, but those early months were a little terrifying in wondering if you’d bring the virus home simply by going outside. I, like many Film Guys, hate watching movies on a phone or tablet, but with nothing to clean at work for months on end, I found a reprieve from the dread in cinema. To be quite clear, most of what I watched was garbage — a ton of DTV horror and action, which, if you know me, is my bread-and-butter — but a few gems snuck through. I’ve written at length about Sophy Romvari’s Still Processing and what that meant to me, but another true source of warmth was Andrew Ahn’s Driveways.

That film, wherein a young boy (Lucas Jaye) and his mother (Hong Chau) find friendship with an elderly war veteran (an astonishing Brian Dennehy in his final performance), struck me most because of Ahn’s patience and restraint. In only his second film, he bypasses every chance for there to be an overwrought, belaboured speech in favor of powerful silences. I think the idea that cinema should strictly be “show, don’t tell” is a bit overused, but there’s something to be said about being allowed to hold the emotion with someone rather than be told what to feel. Ahn finds every space available within his frames to exist and breathe with his characters.

After Driveways, I knew I was going to be a fan of Ahn’s for life. I went back and watched his debut, Spa Night, a gorgeous and vital coming-of-age tale about a gay Korean man finding himself at night in queer spas around LA. Again, those silences were overwhelming, especially held against those cool blues of steamy bathhouses. Even Ahn’s third feature, the more traditional romcom Fire Island, has these powerful moments of quiet that make the laughs of the film just a touch more cathartic.

There’s a complex honesty to Ahn’s films, something that makes them unforgettable in a sea of anonymous indie filmmaking. It’s why when he was announced to remake The Wedding Banquet, one of my favorite Ang Lee films, I found myself more hopeful than skeptical. Surely, if anyone could mine new life out of a genuinely ahead-of-its-time queer love story, it would be him. Faith was rewarded as his update of the story (alongside the original’s co-writer James Schamus) is as urgent and lovely as ever, full of delightful laughs.

Helped by an astonishing cast made up of Kelly Marie Tran, Lily Gladstone, Bowen Yang, Han Gi-chan, Joan Chen, and Youn Yuh-jung (even better here than her Oscar-winning turn in Minari), what makes his retelling truly sing is his now-trademark patience. Here, perhaps more than in any of his previous work, every moment of pain, sadness, hope, or love is expressed through minimal dialogue. In a few key moments, he goes a step further and cuts all dialogue, letting his camera linger on his stars’ faces. Realizations are felt, never said. His trust in his cast and audience, so rare in what could be described as a big box comedy.

I adored The Wedding Banquet and, as I often say before an interview, had to go to the source. In doing so, I had an illuminating and lovely conversation with Andrew. So generous with his time and answers, we had a long and winding talk about his new film, his search for found family throughout his work, conversations he has with his cinematographers and so, so much more. It’s one of my favorite talks I’ve ever had with one of my favorite working filmmakers, no less.

For further reading, be sure to check out my wonderful interview with Kelly Marie Tran and Lily Gladstone which was conducted a few days before this.

You can watch my conversation with Andrew in full below:

We never truly know our loved ones, not really. It doesn’t matter how close we are to somebody, whether by blood or by choice, there’s always going to be a barrier. That barrier, even if paper thin, exists because we can never be inside their head. It’s probably better this way, there has to be some air of mystery, right?

The frustration that comes from not being able to parse what a loved one is thinking is bad enough; now imagine not knowing a loved one at all. How do you grieve a parent who was largely a stranger? How do you hold space for the grief of someone who may have known them better? Grieving is messy, complicated and frankly, a little fucked up. We’re asked to navigate a host of other people’s feelings as they send their condolences and somehow process our own at the same time. It’s an unwieldy, often unhealthy journey, and translates so well cinematically.

This is one of the many threads explored in Invention, the stunning new film from Callie Hernandez and Courtney Stephens. Shot on 16mm with real home movies of Hernandez’s father interspersed, Invention follows Carrie Fernandez (Hernandez playing a thinly veiled version of herself) as she tries to unspool just who the hell her father was and what he was up to after his passing. Her father, Dr. J as he was known to friends, was a practitioner of holistic medicine. After his death, he leaves her a bizarre medical healing device, a device that he, himself, has invented. As she descends rabbit holes of conspiracy, faith, and grief, she meets a beautiful cast of weirdos (many played by other filmmakers like Joe Swanberg and Caveh Zahedi). These people help her unravel the mysteries behind the father she never really knew.

Invention is credited as “A Film by Callie Hernandez” and “Directed by Courtney Stephens.” This distinction is key because it is very much a collaboration between the actress and experimental filmmaker. The story was born from Hernandez having lost her father during COVID. While going through the things he left behind, she found machines like the one in the film. Searching for a way to process her grief and to understand her father and all of his conspiratorial thinking, she decided to make a film based on him. Joining up with Stephens, who’d also lost her father, the filmmaker’s style of collecting found objects was a natural fit for Herndandez’s parsing of the material and mystical.

Creating art “about” our present isn’t easy because we aren’t always equipped to deal with the now without distance. It can cause people to bristle, especially within the last few years, to confront the ways in which our world has become completely fucked, for lack of a better term. The strange internet holes people have found themselves in have been amplified in the wake of the world shutting down for a few years. What’s so special about Invention is the empathy that Hernandez and Stephens approach this from. There’s a real curiosity, if not love, for warped minds and forgotten subcultures that populate the margins of our world. All captured through an honest and blunt glimpse of what it means to grieve the unknown.

The lovely and strange rhythms of Invention blew me away. Creative Non-Fiction is something I’m always finding myself drawn to, and kaleidoscopic approaches to cinema are thrilling to me. Who owns the frames we’re seeing? The audience? The filmmakers? There’s nothing like the tension of being an active participant in a filmmaker questioning the form itself. Invention was already catnip to me. When you add in Hernandez and Stephens breaking the cinematic barrier and allowing actors to slip up and call each other by their real names, or hearing them wrap offscreen, there’s something truly special being unlocked. Those questions of whose story is it to tell, whose grief is it to feel, become inextricable from what’s onscreen.

I, of course, had to go to the source, so I sat down with Callie Hernandez and Courtney Stephens to talk in depth about the messiness of grief, authorial ownership in grief and cinema, and so much more. It’s a lovely, open-hearted conversation, and you can view it in full below.

-Brandon Streussnig

A hero is only as good as their villain. Our desire to see criminals taken down in absurd and cathartic ways often relies solely on how despicable said criminals are. Unhinged? Even better. In an almost three-decade career, Jason Statham hasn’t necessarily wanted for great villains but it wasn’t until his recent collaborations with David Ayer that we’ve finally had some 80s-style heavies for him to square off against.

If Statham is the successor to Arnold or Sly (something you can read David Ayer and I discuss in my recent interview for The Playlist), then his villains oughta be larger-than-life caricatures, eating every inch of the screen. We had tastes of that in last year’s delightful Beekeeper with Taylor James’s Kraven the Hunter-esque final boss and Megan Le’s psychotic evil Beekeeper, but both only popped into the movie for fleeting moments.

In Statham and Ayer’s latest collaboration, wonderful throwback A Working Man, our hero has an entire rogues gallery of human traffickers to contend with. From Chidi Ajufo’s Dutch, a giant of a motorcycle gang leader to a cascade of Russian mob-types goofing it up all around him, Statham’s Levon Cade has no shortage of memorable faces to kick in. One face that completely took me off guard was Eve Mauro’s Artemis.

Covered in tattoos (including forehead ink espousing a classic from John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”), cackling like a maniac and looking like a million bucks, it took of all thirty seconds of screen time for me to ask myself “who the hell is this??” As soon as the press screening ended, I went straight to Google to figure out why I hadn’t seen this woman in a hundred movies by now. It turned out I had, in fact, seen her in the great little Dolph Lundgren DTV-joint Riot but with a screen presence like hers, I couldn’t believe A Working Man was the first time she was able to explode on screen in a giant theater.

A Working Man is another solid Ayer/Statham effort that would totally work on its own but when Mauro’s Artemis is onscreen, the movie jumps to eleven. Whether it’s her pure sadism or bizarre, not-so-subtle relationship with brother Viper (Emmett J. Scanlan), there’s just something about her performance that sticks to the ribs long after the credits roll. Artemis could’ve been a silly, if forgettable heavy that spits a few lines of venom, is killed and never thought of again. In Eve Mauro, you have that rare villain that has you wondering what they’re up to when they’re not in the film.

Wanting to know more, I went to the source and had a lively conversation with Eve. From working with Ayer and Statham to crafting Artemis physically and emotionally to be more than a stock bad guy, to the fulfillment she gets from charity work and how she became a producer on an upcoming doc on the criminally underrated Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E., we hit it all. If you’ve read me long enough, you know that action is what’s nearest and dearest to my heart. The joy of that is often discovering faces you were unfamiliar with. Henchmen or one-off fighters who pop right off the screen. Eve is right up there as one of the best and I’m certain A Working Man isn’t the last we’ll see of her.

You can watch our conversation in its entirety below.

-Brandon Streussnig

It’s always revitalizing to discover a new voice in cinema. Sometimes they come out of nowhere, other times they build a smaller body of work like music videos or short films, before bursting onto the scene with something potent. French director Fleur Fortuné falls into the latter category, an artist honing her craft for over a decade and now arriving fully formed with sci-fi romp The Assessment.

Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Alicia Vikander and Himesh Patel, The Assessment’s press notes describe it as such: “In a not-so-distant future where parenthood is strictly controlled, a couple's mysterious seven-day assessment for the right to have a child unravels into a nightmare, forcing them to question the very foundations of society.” Like the best two or three-handers, it winds you up slowly, patiently sinking you into character dynamics and peppering in moments of dread or unease. Before you know it, the couple’s lives are given way to true insanity, in large part due to Alicia Vikander’s wild performance.

(To read more about the film and about Olsen and Vikander’s process of sinking into this future world, I had a great conversation with the pair for The Film Stage, linked here. )

It would be one thing for this to be carried by its performances, I mean how many times have you seen a single-location film and found yourself thinking “this could’ve been a play”? Not in Fleur Fortuné’s hands. Her future world isn’t cold, clinical, Apple Store-chic but instead one that feels oddly familiar. The “Haves” of this society exist beyond a domed environment, staving off an unnamed climate crisis. Our couple lives near a gorgeous ocean, Olsen’s Mia spending much of her time swimming or tending to her greenhouse. Their home is almost brutalist in its cold, rigid exterior, a small marker that this is, in fact, a dystopian future but once inside, there’s a lived-in quality that eases you immediately. Piet Mondarian-style windows, worn couches, an almost rustic kitchen, all signifiers that yes, despite the dark future you’re peering into, a human touch will hopefully always exist.

Fortuné’s eye is so special and it’s one that’s identifiable if you’re like me and have spent years with her work. Prior to this feature debut, Fortuné, alongside creative partner Manu (as Fleur and Manu), crafted the look we’d come to associate with M83. Working on videos like ‘Midnight City’ and ‘Wait’, she was a key component to developing the band’s image alongside their dreamy, hypnotic sound. Her work seemed to move with my own taste in music, M83 being what I was bumping in my early 20s in college and then, all the way to the rap I love now. Directing Travis Scott’s incredible ‘Birds in the Trap’ video, Fortuné brought something of a Neo-Afrofuturist look calling to mind recent films like Atlantique or Saloum. Even her ad work is distinct, her collaboration with Pharrell on his Chanel campaign a true highlight of the form.

She’s someone I’ve had my eye on for quite a while and her jump to features isn’t just exciting, it’s a breath of fresh air for sci-fi. It’s a genre we all love but one that’s often remained mired in cold, hollow aesthetics. Fortuné’s style has a warmth to it which makes the political and personal ramifications of her film hit you just a little harder than they would in a unrecognizable, alien future.

In time with the release of The Assessment, I had the privilege to sit down with Fleur for a great chat about the film, crafting its look, her music video work and so much more. You can watch the full conversation in full below.

-Brandon Streussnig

Living up to famous family is a tall order. When your grandparents are the Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, most wouldn’t even bother to follow in their footsteps. It takes a brave filmmaker to strike out on their but that’s exactly what Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel is if his debut Armand is any indication.

Set inside a parent/teacher conference, Armand follows Elizabeth (Renate Reinsve) as she’s called into to settle a matter involving her son, the titular Armand. Parents of a classmate of his are alleging that Armand’s done something quite serious, veering into disturbing, to their son. To settle the matter, the school stages a meeting between Elizabeth, the other child’s parents and members of the staff. What follows is an unraveling, not only of Elizabeth’s psyche but of the systems in place that allow for the immediate persecution of a person based on hearsay and class structures. Tøndel creates an entire society inside this barren school, one that seeks to persecute before understanding. To judge implicitly without considering facts. To tear a mother down because of past “sins” or personal vendettas.

As Elizabeth’s psyche is laid bare, the proceedings give way to increasingly surreal outbursts. Multiple interpretive dance moments, characters disappearing into dark rooms and most disarming, a jaw-dropping moment where Elizabeth loses herself to a laughing spell that goes on for close to ten minutes. It’s the kind of moment that begins as funny, drifts into the uncomfortable, trails off into monotony and still, circles back into awkward hilarity. It’s the moment of the film and one that rings around inside your head long after you emerge into the world post-film.

None of these bold choices work without an actor willing to go all in on the abrasive nature of Elizabeth and what she’s set to endure. Fortunately for Tøndel, Renate Reinsve is the exact performer you’d want on your side to explore these themes and explosions of insanity. After making herself known to the world with a tremendous performance in The Worst Person in the World, Renate has shown an innate ability, time and again, to give herself over to difficulty. She doesn’t simply make watching uncomfortable moments or “difficult” characters fun to watch, she imbues them with an empathy that’s nearly impossible to find as a viewer. As Elizabeth, Reinsve contorts herself as the pressure from the other parents mounts, twisting like a coiled spring until she can’t take it anymore. Reinsve digs beneath generic words like “humanity” or “depth” and finds a soul to Elizabeth that nobody onscreen seems interested in trying to understand. It’s an astonishing performance that grounds an elusive film.

I had the chance to sit down with Reinsve and Tøndel to talk about Armand, playing difficult people and how the hell they pulled off that burst of laughter. What follows is our conversation which we jump into as the two are admiring the shelves of movies behind me.

Brandon: Thanks so much for taking the time today, guys, first I’d -

Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel: Wow! Look at all of these movies behind you!

Renate Reinsve: Agnes Varda, Mulholland Drive!

Yeah, I might have too many if I’m honest. (laughs)

HUT: No, no it’s great. Showgirls! I love Showgirls.

Oh yeah, that’s an all time favorite for me. Well, Right off the bat, I want to ask about the choreography that went into both interpretive dances in this. Rentate, how much did you bring to that?

RR: I felt that the choreographer hadn't completely understood the character the way I wanted to play her. So we had a lot of differences and she wanted to make more of a dance and I wanted to make it more strange and [borne] from the state she was in. So yeah, that was the first.

And the second dance scene, that was heavily choreographed, but I hurt my back. It's a very physical role, so my back was so stiff during the shoot because of Elizabeth's dress, so I hadn't really rehearsed it. I did it a couple of times before we shot it, so I didn't really get to experience it with emotion. So when we came on set and I got into the emotion of the character in that dance, it was very, very intense. It was more set up as a structure and a dance and a choreographer with the camera. And then it became a very intense scene that actually gave a lot more to the story than we thought in the original. But I come from the theater, so I really love working with these kinds of specific expressions or physicality to express a character's inner world. So I'm very comfortable with that and have a lot of fun with it.

Halfdan, Armand is not a musical, of course, but I feel like the way you frame bodies and the way you shoot bodies, there’s so much musicality to it. It specifically reminded me of one of my favorite movies, Cabaret, in the way the bodies are so rigid and it's also striking. Who were some of the guideposts in terms of filmmakers that you were looking towards when you were blocking and framing this?

HUT: Bob Fosse's one of my favorite directors. I'm actually more inspired by All That Jazz, but his work in general and the way he shows physicality and his unpredictable structure that he uses in his films, it was very inspiring for me. I have many different inspirations. I have a very eclectic taste myself, and I have many different inspirations for this film. I watched a lot of single location movies, Rosemary's Baby and The Celebration, and tried to understand how to shoot a single location movie that still felt cinematic. In terms of how to shoot the film, me and the DP were actually really inspired by Steven Spielberg and how he uses blocking to be efficient. But at the same time, also, I think Steven Spielberg has one of the most rhythmical, elegant ways of composing his shots and that was something we were really inspired by. And I was super inspired by how they shot the apartment in In The Mood for Love where we don't have any sense of the geography to create this claustrophobia. And we wanted to mix all those things with a lot of close-ups to create tension and claustrophobia. So yeah, there were a lot of different inspirations for this film.

I know you two worked on a short together in the past and that made you want to both work together on a feature. What do you feel like you both bring out of each other as collaborators and creatively?

RR: Enthusiasm! I feel we're like kids playing with paint on set.

HUT: Yeah, kids playing with paint on set. And at the same time, when the first time I really watched Renate on set doing her first scene, it was day three, and I was like, my mouth was open because I got so inspired, I got so enthusiastic, my mind was exploding with the different offers that Renate as an actor gave me. And I really tried on it as a director, constantly looking for her little signs that she gave me during the acting that we could pick up on and work on.

RR: And also again, then when you picked up the signs, because some directors, when you work with them, they don't see the little things that you do. So it's also very inspiring for an actor if he's like, "Oh, I saw that little thing. Make that a little bigger." Then you get more. Yes, it's very inspiring. And also you love your actors and you love what they do, so I feel like everyone in this movie is so good because you took the time to get to know their way of working and worked on different ways with all of them.

Renate, I really love how you seem to be drawn to very uncomfortable situations and difficult circumstances. I remember you did a short years ago called Sweet Things.

RR: Yeah!

And that presents a very uncomfortable situation for you. Criterion posted a picture of you two together in the closet recently and the films you’re holding -

RR: The dark things (laughs)

Yes! I laughed even though it felt inappropriate, I laughed at you holding up Come and See with a big smile on your face. What excites you about playing these uncomfortable situations and difficult people? How do you find empathy for them?

RR: I think honestly from my past experiences. So I have a way of understanding and trying to work through my painful experiences, and I have found it very liberating to get to go into a character and really study my reactions and the other person's reaction to that specific thing that I put into it. And I think also when I've watched movies that go into something in your subconscious like David Lynch does, or this Come and See, when I saw it the first time, I just couldn't believe the depth of these two kids in what they did in the movie. And of course it's extremely painful, but it's something liberating with someone having so much respect for those stories.

And also Isabelle Huppert, some things that she has done, and Nicole Kidman, it touches on something that you can't explain and you can't really talk about in real life. And I think to go into those spaces of being a human being and relating to each other in society, I think it's so important and so fantastic. But yeah, it is demanding. I talked to Halfdan, I should do some comedy soon or something.

It's funny because even the comedies you've done like Worst Person in the World or A Different Man, you still come away from those feelings like, oh, shit, you feel it in your chest when it's over. (Laughs)

RR: Oh yeah (laughs)

Halfdan, this is your first feature and it's so confident and ambitious. Where did the seed for the story come from, and was it always going to end up as surreal as it gets when you first started writing it, or did that come as you were developing it?

HUT: It was always the first draft and also ended in a very surreal way. The first draft actually was a total rip-off from the ending of All That Jazz. So it was a copy of All That Jazz. It was just Elizabeth and Sarah instead of the other characters, but it was dancing and it was on a stage and things like that. So it was always going to end up in a quite surreal direction.

With this first feature I was sick and tired of seeing films that always played it safe. When I first got the opportunity to actually direct a feature film, I wanted to take full advantage of that and take some chances and try to be brave and try to express myself and try to also create a space for actors and the crew to express themselves. I think that's such an important thing. And some of my favorite first feature films are films where you really see the personalities behind the film. And for me, that's much more interesting than seeing a perfect first film. And when you have that as a premise for the shoot and for the film, it's quite easy to be confident in making those choices because it's really the only way of doing it. You have to stand by your choices. And I also wanted this film to be a film about choices and not just about covering or telling the story in a safe way. I wanted us to actually take some chances and make choices on set.

Well, and speaking of choices, that unbroken laughing sequence. I love how it starts off as funny, and then gets uncomfortable, and then you get to a point where you're kind of like, "Oh man, I can't believe this is still going." Then it circles back into uncomfortably funny again. Can you walk me through performing that and directing that? How many takes did it get to nail that?

RR: I don't know how many takes, but it took 10 hours that day.

Jesus.

RR:Yeah! But I think to be able to get to that place where that happens, because laughing in itself is really hard and crying in itself, for me at least, is really hard to be open and vulnerable. So doing those two, just flipping and seeing the moment in between, it's impossible. So I knew that the only way to be able to do it was to actually lose control. So finding a way to build my analysis so that anything is possible and starting her off in the movie in really high intensity so it was possible to calculate it into that moment. And then just doing it for so long, I was so exhausted. I started losing control. And it was a really big teamwork. I got a joke from the sound guy, Helge, and then I was saying to you in the morning, "I'm not going to be able to do it. It's impossible." And then you said, "You're going to do it, you're going to do it." And the other actors were amazing, and it was just a really big day. But now we can be very proud.

HUT: We are very proud. (laughs)

Behind me with all of those movies you were looking at are a ton of martial arts films because I love the physicality of them, I love stunt work. In a way, the physicality you take on in this movie is kind of like stunt work. What kind of mental and physical prep did you have to do for this, and how the hell did you decompress after shooting this?

RR: Yes. It's like to link it to what we talked about before also with... I don't know, it's so hard to talk about this in a complex way because I have tried to talk about it a little bit because to go into something that is a little painful and to... It's so hard to talk about it, and now I get all red. But I'm really happy that people see how... And I get so embarrassed by getting all these compliments too. (laughs)

No, no it’s ok. I’m nervous literally all time (laughs) but this is great because it leads me into thinking about how you’ve said in the past that fame and spotlight make you uneasy at times. In that way, Elizabeth is such a different character than who you are because she's an actress who wants to be seen by people, and she's showing off and performing a little bit. How do you perform a performance inside a performance like that?

RR: Yeah, she was actually an uncomfortable character to play. And also because there's a lot of prejudice against actors being manipulative or lying in what they do. And for me, the truth and really trying to be honest with something in myself and expose, I really believe, and I appreciate so much when actresses do that, try to open up to something that is shameful in them or something that is... and that can be either positive traits or negative traits. And I really feel that as an audience, it's very liberating to watch when someone does that. So I really try to be honest and go as deep as I can in every theme.

But yeah, I'm not like Elizabeth, but I love going into characters that are so different and try to understand something in myself. And of course, you will meet something in yourself you're not comfortable with going into someone you think is also very opposite and finding similarities. It is a very uncomfortable process, but I really think it's healthy and I believe in that perspective and going into a role or a story like that. I think that is the artistic part of this project.

*Armand is now playing in select theaters in NY/LA and will release wide on February 14th, 2025*

Watching your heroes grow old is rarely pretty. In action that’s doubly true. We attach ourselves to these muscled up, impossibly cool stars and for a good decade, or two if we’re lucky, these people throw their gorgeous bodies around until they’re a broken heap. Outliers like Tom Cruise are the exception. For the most part we have to be content with watching stars of yesteryear embarrass himself in twenty DTV films a year, pining for the days when he gave a shit. Very rarely do these stars get a film that actively feels like they’re saying goodbye. Sure, you have Dolph or JCVD putting in career best work in their late period, sometimes reckoning with their place in all of this, but it’s not often a final lead performance functions as a walk into the sunset.

Lee Marvin was dead well before I was a thought in anybody’s mind. When I was around fifteen, we screened The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in a high school film studies/humanities class. I’d of course known who John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart were but my attention was immediately ripped away by this face cut from stone who had a voice so deep, it couldn’t possibly be real. I was obsessed, I’d never seen anyone like him. I’d never heard anyone like him. As my taste in film solidified, I spent the better part of the next fifteen years tracking down anything starring this man.

Digging through the classics, I often found myself trying to process how this guy was real. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. Hysterical in Cat Baillou, terrifying in The Killers, ice cold in Prime Cut or wrenching in Hell in the Pacific, Marvin was more than your average tough guy. He found pathos in every role he took, a soulful beauty behind those piercing blue eyes. Even in a dud like Paint Your Wagon, he made sure he was the thing you remembered. It was never enough to be imposing. That wry smile would slink its way across his granite face, always giving more than you’d ever expect.

Rightfully, history judges Point Blank as his masterpiece. Even if the rest of the movie were forgettable, that walk would be etched into the annals of cinema forever. Marvin’s Walker gliding down an impossibly long hallway, intercut with his prey. As Walker moves into a car, his footsteps ring out over the film like a ticking clock. In that moment, John Boorman sealed Marvin as the baddest man to ever grace the silver screen. Boorman understood better than anyone that Lee Marvin filled a frame like no other. He didn’t need to speak. He didn’t need to throw a punch. He didn’t even need to look at you. If Lee Marvin’s coming for you, you better run for your goddamn life.

Point Blank is, of course, a crime classic beyond that walk. It’s the template for countless revenge films and we’ve spent an eternity chasing its effortless cool. It also cemented Marvin as a legend. Not an action star in the traditional sense, he was never going to throw himself off of buildings or have a technically proficient fight scene. He could, however, throw fists with the best of them and nobody looked better holding a gun. His chilly demeanor and imposing figure fits right in with the kind of star that became the staple of the genre.

By 1984, after a career’s worth of shoot ‘em ups in the old west, back alleys and everywhere in between, a sixty year old Marvin found himself in Yves Boisset’s Dog Day. Boisset, a French journeyman, was an efficient hand whose films always looked a hell of a lot better than they had any right to. Shot in France, starring a cast of French actors who were then dubbed, Marvin was there to lend a star power, his name perhaps having a bit more meaning there than in US productions. Think Rick Dalton traveling to Italy when his career fizzled out.

Look, Dog Day doesn’t seem special and truth be told it isn’t. In fact, it’s pretty bad. All over the place, full of rancid jokes, some wildly racist depictions and a Marvin who’s clearly too old to be doing this, it’s a drag. It’s that last part, though, that circles back around into something melancholic and moving. Opening on a haggard Marvin fleeing through a field, a bag of stolen money at his side, you’re overcome by the prevailing thought of “Christ, Lee, you look old.” It’s a jarring image, not least because Marvin looked old his entire career. Thirties, fifties, didn’t matter, the guy was born with the face of a grown man. Here, though, he looks broken down, exhausted and frankly, finished.

Playing renowned gangster, Jimmy Cobb, Marvin’s on the run after a robbery goes south. Finding refuge in a farmhouse, Marvin’s Cobb spends the majority of the film gingerly stepping in and out of various houses, hiding behind walls and stacks of hay. Around him is an insane cast of characters from a horribly racist caricature of an African man named DooDoo, a woman who chases DooDoo around begging him to “play with her pussy”, a repugnant farmer who gropes everyone he sees and a pair of horny Swiss women camping in the outskirts of town. It’s a lot to take in and only legendary French actress Miou-Miou, as the farmer’s abused wife Jessica, is given even a shred of humanity.

You don’t go into exploitation expecting anything less but as wild as that sounds, Dog Day spends far too long spinning its wheels. That gives you time to examine Marvin’s Cobb as he takes in his surroundings. As he lazily drifts from one room to another trying to stay out of sight, there’s a look of “what am I doing here?” that creeps across his face. Sure, Jimmy seeing the madness around him would undoubtedly wonder what he’s gotten himself into but there’s something else there. This is a man who starred alongside titans like John’s Wayne and Cassavetes. A man who duked it out with Toshirō Mifune. A man who wooed Angie Dickinson. It’s not just you asking yourself what’s become of him. Through withering glances and monosyllabic grunts, Lee seems to be too.

Accepting that you’re cooked isn’t an easy thing to accept. Watching one of cinema’s finest leading men realize it in real time is heartbreaking. Perhaps a viewer’s projection, as the cops close in around Cobb at the end of the film, Dog Day becomes more than a late period clunker. He knows his time is up and he’s got nowhere else to go. He had a great run, the legend’s been printed a thousand times over. Cobb, Lee, doesn’t matter. Here, in this farmhouse, it’s all the same. Marvin mutters something about keeping that legend for himself, places the gun under his chin, wide shot of the farmhouse…

*BANG*

Just like that, he’s gone.

Marvin, of course, wouldn’t pass until 1987, three years later. He’d pop up in one more film, playing second fiddle and ostensible torch passer to Chuck Norris in Delta Force. But for all intents and purposes, Dog Day is Marvin’s final turn as a leading man. Knowing that, a minor footnote takes on a weight it couldn’t possibly deserve. It becomes a goodbye to a screen presence that never existed before and hasn’t been replicated since. Running through those fields of wheat, breathing those labored breaths, Lee Marvin is racing against the clock of a life closing in around him. Lying low in that dingy farmhouse, he’s given time to ruminate on that life. And boy, what a life it was. Gun under his chin, he finally accepts that a man like Lee Marven doesn’t let some run of the mill slob take him out.

Only a man as ineffably cool as Lee Marvin gets to take Lee Marvin out.

-Brandon Streussnig

If you've followed me anywhere on the internet, you probably know that I make no bones about the fact that I spent a decade as a graveyard shift janitor. I was very proud of my job and I talk a bit about it in terms of just being a working class guy trying to survive in a gig-based economy like freelancing while doing a full time job that takes every bit of energy out of you. I’ve spoken so much about this that I made it masthead of this Substack.

Additionally, if you’ve followed me anywhere, you know I write predominantly about action films and stunts. What you might not know is that on the other end of the spectrum of people kicking the shit out of one another, my favorite pocket of cinema is Slow Cinema. Filmmakers like Tsai Ming-liang or Apitchatpong Weerasethakul or Hong Sang-soo create these image and soundscapes that allow me to sink myself into, stripping cinema down to its barest elements. I’m such an image-based viewer and their work is maybe what I respond to most. The quiet interludes of life or non-verbal intimacy that we don’t always get to see. It’s not often that I get to write or talk about the other areas of film I love and I’ve spent my move to NYC trying to unbox the action-box I’ve put myself in. Mark Asch, critic and programmer at Spectacle NYC, reached out earlier this month because he knew I’d been looking to expand my horizons a bit with a film that seemed tailor-made for me.

Alfred Giancarli’s Weeknights follows a few guys and their nightly routines as graveyard shift laborers. A security guard, bodega worker and ride-share driver, strangers all but unified in their existence in the loneliest time of day. Mark keyed me into this because he had a feeling that the slow rhythms of the late night existence Giancarli captures here. Boy, was he right.

I've never seen a film find the isolating liminal space you exist within having to start your day while everyone you know or love is winding down. Buildings become monolithic structures for you to lose yourself inside. Small talk with a corner store cashier is your lifeblood of connection. Beeps from distant cars echo around your head like a memory. Your body never really gets used to how fucked up your sleep cycle is and any chance to nod off for just a few minutes is true bliss. The nighttime air and darkness feels serene, especially compared to how daylight is so disorienting and stark. The once distant sounds of life immediately become sonic booms as the waking world intrudes upon your solitude. You limp to bed, never quite resting because you have to do it all over again.

Weeknights is such a special film. Nails everything that makes that way of life so romantic and haunted, and why I'm glad I'm not in it anymore. Giancarli is a filmmaker that I’m immediately going to follow anywhere. An instant name that, if you respond well to Tsai or Weerasethakul especially, you’ll want to keep an eye on. I also recommend seeking out Tsai’s Days and Bas Devos’s Ghost Tropic to put you in the mindset before this one becomes widely available.

I was so affected by this one that I had to speak to Alfred immediately. Below is our conversation about the film, the isolation of late-nights, Tsai and what’s next for the film as he finds more spaces to screen it. To that last point, keep an eye out on my Twitter and Instagram because I’ll actively be promoting this as he announces dates and showings. He’s a great conversationalist and this one’s a fun listen.

*NOTE: the connection between our Zoom call was a little dicey in spots and the conversation freezes here and there. It doesn’t disrupt his answers or make anything unclear, I just wanted prepare you for that.*

When you think of action in the 80s and early 90s, those halcyon days fronted by impossible-looking lunkheads and wild stunts, a few filmmakers likely come to mind: John McTiernan, James Cameron, John Woo, and maybe Renny Harlin. With work like The Terminator or Hard Boiled or Predator, their contributions are inarguable. There’s one name that should be counted amongst those greats, however. A name that has ties to McTiernan and fellow heavyweight Walter Hill. A name that gifted the world three action face-melters starring supposed “B-Listers” that rank alongside any of Arnie and Sly’s best. That name is Craig Baxley. 

Baxley didn’t make his directorial debut (1988’s Action Jackson) until well into action’s golden age, but by then, he was already well-established as the kind of steady hand you’d want on set. As a stuntman and coordinator, Baxley’s name appears all over 70s television staples like Dukes of Hazzard, M*A*S*H, and Police Story. From there, he graduated to the big screen, primarily working as a coordinator for Walter Hill. It isn’t until he hooks up with McTiernan on Predator that you begin to realize there’s something special happening with Craig Baxley. 

As a second unit director, Baxley helped deliver for whatmy money (and, according to current action legend Scott Adkins via the Action for Everyone podcast) might be the best pure action ever put to film. With relentless gun fights, wild explosions, and a fantastic fight between Arnold and the Predator, Predator looks and moves like a beast. It’s about as perfect a calling card as one could hope for if they wanted to make the jump to directing something of their own. 

Action Jackson is the first in a three-picture run where Baxley, fully formed and polished as hell, takes a guy primarily considered to be right below the A-list and hammers out something special. Starring Carl Weathers, Action Jackson moves like a typical cop thriller but Baxley quickly establishes himself as a primo proprietor of mayhem. Plot, such as it is, is thin. Weathers’ cop, the terrifically named Sgt. Jericho Jackson is dead set on taking down evil auto magnate Peter Dellaplane (Craig T. Nelson). No one’s really here for that, though, are they? It’s all about atmosphere and carnage, and that’s something Baxley gets down to his marrow. Jackson belts out screamers like “HOW YA LIKE YOUR RIBS???” before torching someone with a flamethrower. Weathers is in peak physical shape, and boy, does the camera love him. Vanity, maybe the most beautiful person in the world at the time, shows up if the screen wasn’t already melting. It’s a collection of gorgeous madness, full of personality and sexuality. It's the kind of stuff that feels depressingly distant in modern action. 

Amidst Weather’s glistening abs, killer jabs, and a mesmerizing early Sharon Stone performance, Baxley peppers in astonishing stunt work that you can’t believe he’s pulling off on a budget much lower than his contemporaries. Weathers throwing fools through windows and leaping onto cars would be exciting enough for most, but not for Baxley. Long before the Fast & Furious series was finding new ways to drive cars into and off of buildings, Baxley has Jackson drive his Pontiac Fiero into Dellaplane’s mansion, up the stairs, and into the bedroom. It’s a legitimate jaw-dropper of a sequence and a preview for the kind of stunts Baxley’s going to pull just a few years later. 

“Merry Christmas, mother fucker” is the opening line of Baxley’s Jackson follow-up Dark Angel (or I Come in Peace as it’s also known), and right away, you know you’re in for another joy. Perhaps the weakest of the Baxley trio but no less kinetic, Dark Angel follows Dolph Lundgren’s Det. Jack Caine as he investigates a gang of drug dealers. Paired with Special Agent Smith (funny man of the moment Brian Benben), Caine goes undercover into Houston’s underbelly. Unbeknownst to him, he’s just entered into a parallel cops and criminal chase of the intergalactic variety between two aliens. Talec, a criminal from another world, is racking up bodies while being pursued by a cop, Azeck, from his home world. It’s only inevitable that Dolph and Talec find themselves on a collision course. 

It’s all very silly and frightening similarities with Predator 2, also released in 1990, aside Dark Angel is my favorite kind of genre mashup. Taking a by-the-numbers cop thriller and tossing in aliens who kill using CDs so they can extract a chemical to use as a drug in their home world? Yeah. It’s wild stuff, but where Baxley works, his magic isn’t so much in the action (though it’s typically brilliant) but in how he manages to coalesce all the threads into something that makes sense. None of this should work, but like Action Jackson, it looks fantastic and has a real lived-in quality to how people speak to one another. His biggest feat, though? Letting Dolph be funny. 

Dolph Lundgren is a freak of nature. The most gorgeous of his contemporaries with the brain of a genius and a body cut from marble, he’s a dream. Dark Angel exists as a bit of an unsung turning point for him, though, because prior to it, he wasn’t really allowed to show his lighter side. Dropping one-liners (including maybe the finest send-off of all time) like it’s nothing and cracking that killer smile, Dolph is having the time of life as Caine. Baxley’s leads are often guys who probably weren’t marketable enough to lead a major production, but he always got the kind of performances out of them that probably should’ve changed that. We know Carl Weathers has charm for days, but in 1990, Dolph had only primarily been a broody heavy, give or take. He’s great at that, sure, but god bless Baxley for seeing more in him. Without Dark Angel perhaps we don’t get Dolph cracking jokes with Brandon Lee in Showdown in Little Tokyo or chewing scenery in Universal Soldier. 

Binding Baxley’s miracle run together is his centering of a hulking, gorgeous brute with a bit of soft, erudite side, living in the nicest apartment you’ve ever seen. No one embodies that better than Brian Bosworth as Joe Huff. And no film embodies the Craig Baxley ethos better than Stone Cold. Brian Bosworth was molded out of clay to play a Baxley lead. As Joe Huff, he lumbers through a burnt-out Mississippi, blonde mullet flowing and earring dangling. He’s a meathead work of art astride his chopper, boring a hole into your soul behind tiny sunglasses.

In Baxley’s Mississippi, white supremacist bikers rule the streets like a backwater Mad Max gang, and only Huff (undercover as John Stone) can stop them. Led by a cool-as-ice Lance Henriksen and a psychotic Bill Forsythe, the gang has been killing government agents. Their endgame is to storm the state capital building, spring one of their brothers on trial, and murder the DA and state Supreme Court justices. In 1991, Craig Baxley predicted the Capitol Riot. He may have just overshot how exciting something like that would actually look. 

After making $5 million look triple that in his previous films, Baxley was given big boy money ($25 mil) with a star-in-the-making to do anything his unhinged mind wanted, and boy did he. Stone Cold is a revelation and as gorgeous as any of its contemporaries. Mississippi feels like a post-apocalyptic wasteland where leather-clad freaks reign supreme, and beach pit fights between mutant musclemen are an everyday occurrence. The costuming is out of this world, the fashions falling into a nebulous void somewhere between 1987 and 2087. It’s a nightmare, and it’s stunning. 

It also features the single greatest stunt I’ve ever seen put to film. You can keep your Tom Cruise scaling the Burj Khalifa arguments because as impressive as that is, it’s got all the resources in the world to make it as safe as possible. That’s never to say Baxley wasn’t safe; the man plied his trade as a stuntman for decades. By 1991, he was as solid and safe as it got. Still, the climax of the film is punctuated by a motorcycle flying out of a capitol building window and exploding into a levitating helicopter in mid-air. It’s astonishing, and it feels like every stunt, explosion, gunfight, and car chase Baxley ever had a hand in was leading to it. Not only is it a perfect punctuation to the wild gamble that is Stone Cold, but it’s a fitting period to Baxley’s action triptych. 

“Gamble” is the key word there because, in hindsight, having Baxley’s foray into the majors be a vehicle for a legendary NFL bust’s attempt at stardom feels remarkably silly. The film bombed, Bosworth never hit it big, and Craig Baxley never got anywhere near that kind of budget again. “Heartbreak” feels a little dramatic but to lose a guy like that’s talents to middling TV movies and Stephen King adaptations no one remembers feels wrong. The gut punch hits harder because Stone Cold is great! Its reputation as a good “bad” movie is short-selling a bonafide ripper. Baxley squeezed every dime out of that budget, and it absolutely shows. And Bosworth more than holds his own as a leading man. Stone Cold’s biggest misfortune, to me anyway, is coming the same year as James Cameron redefined the very nature of action cinema. So we remember Terminator 2 as the juggernaut it is, and Stone Cold is forever destined to be the hidden gem waiting under a pile of rubble, ready to blow someone’s mind.

Craig Baxley never got his due as one of the premiere guys of action cinema’s golden age, but his legacy is alive and well. If you scroll the certain pockets of Twitter long enough, you’ll stumble into a community of people singing the praises of DTV superstars like Scott Adkins or Daniel Bernhardt or Michael Jai White. Martial artists who never quite got the break they deserved as leading men but are quietly pumping out some of the wildest, cleanest action you’ll ever see. Pop in something like Avengement or Ninja II or Skylines, and after you’re finished having your mind blown, you’ll realize that Baxley’s touch never left. It exists in filmmakers like Jesse V. Johnson, Isaac Florentine, and Liam O’Donnell. Guys making genuine magic out of peanuts and minting stars out of people who were told they’d never make it. I certainly wish we’d gotten ten more Baxley Meathead Masterpieces, but that we got three as great as they are at all is a miracle. That they’ve inspired a new golden age of action hiding in DTV, waiting to be discovered, is even better. The cycle continues, and perhaps that’s all it ever needs to do. 

-Brandon Streussnig

With the announcement that Michelle Garza Cervera will be heading up a remake of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (starring the incredible one-two punch of Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Maika Monroe), I thought I’d revive an interview I did with Michelle upon the release of her feature debut, Huesera: The Bone Woman.

I’d never heard of Huesera before wandering into my then-local arthouse in Pittsburgh during a mini-horror festival they were running in January of 2023. Post-screening, I stumbled out into the mid-afternoon daylight, certain I’d seen the debut of a filmmaker that I was going to follow everywhere. In a horror landscape where metaphor has become prioritized over genuine scares, it was thrilling to see a filmmaker balance both and exert such a fresh, confident eye behind the camera. She also has enough confidence in herself and you to keep her film’s demon remote and vague, always leaving you as disoriented as her lead—really stunning stuff.

I knew immediately I had to speak with her and unlock her approach to horror. I sought out her excellent short, The Original, and then chatted with her. What resulted is one of my favorite conversations I’ve ever had with a filmmaker. I think you’ll find a lot to love in this one, maybe even when my brain leaves my head and I forget my question, giving us both a laugh. She’s an incredibly insightful person with so much to say, and it was a true honor to talk with her for a bit.

I’ve left this interview uncut as I think the natural flow plays best that way. You’ll get to see me stumble with how to end the recording, but hey, a look behind the curtain is what you’re paying for, right?

Enjoy!

“This is no end. Always another John.”

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“The temple above us was the wonder of the ancient world. Bisonopolis shall be the wonder of my world. But I think the food court should be larger. All the big franchises will want in.”

So says villainous dictator M. Bison while describing the imminent construction of his garish mega city in 1994’s notorious Street Fighter. Two decades later, America saw a cartoonish buffoon and wannabe despot serve McDonalds as deeply silly political stunt on the campaign trail. Writer/Director Steven De Souza obviously couldn’t predict that; he was, after all, adapting a silly video game beat ‘em up, but as we sit in 2024, Street Fighter feels like a hilariously prescient warning of how stupid things were going to become. Oh, and it’s a damn good movie too. 

Funded almost entirely by Capcom and written in one night (if you believe De Souza), Street Fighter was yet another attempt by Hollywood to ride the wave of video gaming’s exploding popularity. Sandwiched between Super Mario Brothers and Mortal Kombat, the three are held up as the key examples of why adapting video games is a fool’s errand. While Mortal Kombat has slowly been reassessed as a joy of a film and faithful to the games, and some will go to bat hard for Mario Brothers, Street Fighter often feels forgotten. Its lasting legacy exists as memes or GIFS of Raúl Juliá’s M. Bison shouting, “Of course!” or “For me, it was a Tuesday!” In fact, Juliá is cited by many as the only person involved in on the film’s wavelength. True enough, in one of his final performances, Juliá demolishes scenery, clearly relishing hamming it up in a role he only took because of his children. To stop with him is to discount a film bursting at the seams with ideas and personality. 

Watching Street Fighter now is like devouring twenty pounds of candy and coasting on a sugar high for days. Immediately, you’re struck by the plasticine sheen and vibrant costumes. You gaze at Jean-Claude Van Damne’s glistening muscles and hideous blonde dye job. Pop star Kylie Minogue totes a bazooka bigger than she is. The silliness is jarring at first but almost immediately gives way to something else: yearning. Somewhere along the way, Hollywood forgot that this shit is supposed to be fun. Crippled by every studio’s desire to chase the shared universe dragon, we’re stuck in an endless loop of self-important lore that sets up ten more movies, all with ho-hum grayscale visuals. It’s not enough to see wacky freaks of nature on screen; it has to be deathly serious, too. There’s an air of fear around acknowledging the goofiness of source material in modern genre adaptations, be it comics, video games, or otherwise. Street Fighter suffers none of this. Make no mistake; this isn’t just exhaustion with current film trends speaking; it’s impossible to overstate how earnestness on display feels like a salve. 

Plot, if it matters at all, is thin. Something about Allied Nations soldiers (a UN stand-in) being kidnapped by evil General M. Bison, who has designs on taking over the fictitious southeast Asian country Shandaloo, demands $20 billion in return to help fund his Bisonopolis venture. Mixed in amongst the chaos are con artists Ryu and Ken, reporter Chun-Li, and a veritable who’s who of fan favorites from the games. All inevitably coalesce at Bison’s secret base, and come on, you know the rest. Frankly, it’s a mess, but through sheer force of will, Street Fighter transcends something as antiquated as narrative structure. From almost every standpoint, the film makes the wrong choices. Casting famed Belgian JCVD as All-American Guile, hiring Benny “the Jet '' Uriqudez to choreograph the fights and then barely focusing on them (the fights are terrific when they deign to show us), training the cast on their stunts the night before they were to film them, it’s a recipe for disaster. It is a disaster, but it’s one that, despite misunderstanding the game itself, captures the full-on excitement and explosion of color that video games provide. Sets dripping with color fill the frame, each another level for you to explore. It’s an aural and optical adventure like you’ve been shunted into a 16-bit land full of possibility. 

The refreshing sincerity mixed with De Souza’s dependably dry cynicism creates a miasma that hasn’t really been replicated since. M. Bison is a shockingly modern creation. Obsessed with his brand and reformatting the news to fit his image, his goal isn’t just to take over the world; it’s to turn it into a goddamn shopping mall. He’s a strongman without depth, the kind of guy to paste his face on dollar bills, and his mecca is in the shape of a literal skull. Like most men with eyes at capitalistic takeover, there’s no “there” there. He’s silly as hell with his red cape flowing behind him, a fool’s idea of “cool.” He’s a troll with an army of devoted morons ready to take a bullet. Morons like Zangief (a pre-Leatherface Andrew Byrniarski) aren’t being paid to do it and hadn’t even thought that was a possibility. In some ways, with his legion of fans ready to defend him on Twitter at the drop of a hat, M. Bison feels like the tacky logical conclusion of someone like Elon Musk. 

De Souza is taking stock of the fallout of consumerism excess of the 80s, throwing his hands up and using Street Fighter as a means of working through it. There’s a creative rot to a video game company hiring you to adapt their product as quickly as possible. Bison’s childish pursuits feel like an extension of that. It’s a stretch to be sure, and the film’s commentary isn’t particularly salient, but something’s here, something sinister. If all goes well, Bison and his army will have an entire country where the only currency is made up of dollar bills with his face on them. His goals are hilariously infantile, but is the idea of “owning” your own money as some brand IP extension all that different from NFTs? Or whatever crypto-nonsense we’re onto this month? There's nothing like the coke-fueled daydreams of Street Fighter to leave you up at night with galaxy-brained thread connecting. 

Street Fighter’s magic is that its cynicism is reserved only for whatever half-baked commentary it’s wrestling with. When it comes to the source material, it’s got a candy-coated heart, and that’s what cements it as a modern balm. Unlike blockbusters now, where acts of fantasy are undercut by “yeah, it’s silly, we know” one-liners, every joke here is with the movie, not at it. Zangief is a big oaf, but that’s what makes his realization of being used and babyface turn so sweet. When beautiful people in eye-popping costumes are playing this so earnestly, the proclivity to buy in is just so easy. JCVD, eyes glazed over in a cocaine haze, delivers the silliest “rah-rah” speech you’ll ever hear, but in another example of how easily we overlook his talent, he knows this and still plays it with stone-cold seriousness. As Guile screams into the camera, swearing vengeance against Bison, it’s enough to want to leap off the couch and join the Allied Nations yourself. 

Earnestness in the face of stupidity is a quality that will matter more as our world steeps itself in meaningless culture wars. Our digital world is designed to fill your head with hate. This is exemplified most by Carlos Blanka, one of the kidnapped AN soldiers and Guile’s best friend. Bison is creating an army of ubermen, and Blanka is a prime candidate. Pumped with chemicals and a steady visual diet of history’s atrocities, he’s meant to be an angry, violent killer. A funny thing happens, though, and one of Bison’s scientists, Dhalsim, secretly begins slipping visual acts of kindness and morality into Blanka’s mind. What’s birthed is a monster with a heart of gold, one without the influence of constant streams of hate. As we fill ourselves with a daily intake of bile, becoming irony-poisoned feels like the only logical end. A film like Street Fighter, in all its ridiculous glory, is a left-field reminder that as moronic as it all becomes and the dumbest people on earth continue their ascent, sincerity matters. Good people jumping in the air and high-fiving in a freeze frame must count for something. What that is, who’s to say, but sometimes it just feels good to embrace it. 

-Brandon Streussnig