I ASK SIMPLY BECAUSE PREVIEWING THE FILM BEFORE THE FESTIVAL [IFFBOSTON] BEGAN, I SAW IT PROJECTED FROM A DIGITAL PRINT, BUT IT WAS FROM A LOWER-END PROJECTOR, SO I COULDN’T QUITE GET A SENSE OF WHETHER WHAT I WAS SEEING WAS DOING JUSTICE TO WHAT YOU SHOT. Well now, it’s on film in some venues, but it was shot using the Red. It’s not a very colorful movie. It’s pretty muted.
YOU DO WORK WITH A LOT OF DARKNESS WITHIN THE APARTMENT ONCE THE ELECTRICITY IS CUT. Right, yeah. I like that. I darkened that.
WAS YOUR INTENTION TO STAY DISTANCED FROM ARTIFICIAL LIGHT? Yeah, well . . . I mean there was plenty of artificial lighting. All that night stuff is hard. You can’t just use the moon, which isn’t even really there. [Laughs.] But, yeah, I think you just have sort of a gut sense of what this world feels like, and I always saw it as kind of on the muddier side. Like dark, muddy things. The things that are colorful — I knew that shirt would be bright orange. Some things mattered that were colored, but in some ways, I think I reacted to the colorfulness of the last movie, and I took away certain colors that just weren’t going to be allowed in the palette, certain bright colors, yeah.
WHO WAS YOUR DP? His name is Nikolai von Graevenitz, a German DP
AND WHO SHOT ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW? Chuy Chávez, a Mexican DP.
HERE IN HARVARD SQUARE, THERE WAS A CONTINUOUS LOOP OF A SHORT FILM THAT YOU WROTE, MIGUEL ARTETA’S ARE YOU THE FAVORITE PERSON OF ANYBODY?, AND I’D ALWAYS STAND TRANSFIXED IN FRONT OF THE SCREEN, WATCHING AND RE-WATCHING IT, WITH SOME PEOPLE STOPPING TO WATCH IT WITH ME, AND STILL OTHERS NOT KNOWING WHAT TO MAKE OF IT. Chuy’s in that.
DO YOU HAVE ANY PANS OF WORKING WITH MIGUEL AGAIN? No, no. I mean, he gave some feedback on the script of this movie. He’s great, but no, we’re each busy on our own things.
SO HOW DID THAT SHORT COME ABOUT, THEN? Well, I had just finished shooting Me and You, and so Chuy was still in town, and I wrote what ended up being the script of that short film, and Miguel was like, “I want to make a movie of this!” And I was like, okay, fine. And everyone in that movie is all friends with him. It was very thrown together.
AND JOHN C. REILLY . . . John Reilly I think lives just a few blocks from his house.
I REALIZE YOU’RE PROMOTING THE FUTURE RIGHT NOW, BUT DO YOU HAVE ANOTHER PROJECT IN THE PIPELINE? Yeah, but not . . . I mean, I’m working on a novel.
THAT ANSWERS MY NEXT QUESTION, SINCE YOU CLEARLY DO A LOT MORE THAN JUST MAKE MOVIES. Yeah, and now’s the time to kind of do the other things that I do, or else I’ll never do them if I start another movie right now. So, yeah — some art things, a performance — those are the things I want to before the next movie, but I do want to make another one. It’s hard. In a way, part of me wants to jump in and do everything right on another movie that I did wrong on this one, which I think most filmmakers do, but. . . .
