Nor’easter Blog

Margaret, by Kenneth Lonergan

Ray Carney’s writings on what he calls the Pragmatist Aesthetic are the most influential pieces of film criticism and theory I’ve read, and to a large extent have informed what I think about my life, not just my relationship to art. At the heart of Carney’s work is the idea that the slippery, shifting nature of experience belies our typically fixed, subjective views of ourselves and others. He sees mainstream film as constantly idealizing and conceptualizing the people, places, and things it chooses to show and not show, thereby creating “deep” meanings for practically everything that appears on screen. C.F. Kane’s house on a hill is not simply a house on a hill, but rather a palace of isolation. Norman Bates is not simply a motel worker but a box of illicit ideas and feelings to be summarized and psychologized at film’s end.

When Carney gets to his point in the essay I’ve linked, he discusses the alternative, what he calls the Pragmatist Aesthetic, and the tools used by filmmakers like John Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, Vittorio De Sica, Tom Noonan, and many others. What they have in common is an attention to the physical world and a reckless abandonment of the subjective viewpoint. Intentions are tossed out the window. Clearly articulated desires and achievable goals are passed over in favor of circuitous, fluctuating narratives that often feel full of dead ends and relational misfires.

The practical result of this approach can be positively world-changing, in that it forces the spectator’s worldview out of the subjective interior and into a world of others. It demands that the viewer forget the simple (and almost unavoidably simplistic) wants of the protagonist and instead engage in a constantly shifting, ungainly world in which each individual holds a living, breathing position with its own responsibilities, most of which have nothing to do with the primary narrative.

Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret was released yesterday after an extraordinarily long time in post-production, not to mention the courtroom. It is an absolutely breathtaking piece of work, and probably the greatest pragmatist work made in my lifetime. But it succeeds so phenomenally not just because the scenework is superlative (it is), but because its style is born of its content, and its content is born of Lonergan’s incomparable understanding of his subject – otherness itself.

Anna Paquin plays Lisa Cohen, a seventeen year-old girl who distracts a New York City bus driver just long enough for him to hit and kill a woman, played by Allison Janney. Though the ambiguity of who did what to whom is fundamentally engaging, Lonergan’s subject is neither the facts nor the ideas they drudge up, but Lisa’s revelation of the inherent fallibility and ultimate irrelevance of her subjectivity to the world at large. And the shock of the knowledge revealed, to borrow a phrase from Carney, is not one of information handed down but of experience, frustration, dead-ends, circuity, fumbling, stuttering, and flailing.

Lonergan fills out Margaret with an array of impossibly rich characters, all of whom have something else better to be doing than what the narrative asks of them. Their lives are occupied and splintered, and the specificity of the choices Lonergan makes in both backstory and action for even the tertiary characters in the film are simply exhilarating. (A scene in which an older Jewish woman tries to both flirt with, command, and condescend to a young, black lawyer whom she’s known since long before he went to law school is startling in its detail and dynamic range.)

The camera work, though superficially muddy, grainy, inconsistent and flat in places, is, as in the works of Cassavetes, Elaine May, and Barbara Loden, constantly filled with additional, equally important action behind, or sometimes in front of, the primary action. The repeatedly surprising deferrals and outright rejections of subjectivity and insistence on profiles, oblique angles, and separated coverage at points of growing intensity and typically “direct” confrontation are unexpected almost to the point of being disorienting. Lisa is so firmly thrust out of the immediate, flattering, woe-is-me world of teenage dramatics that even a shot of a busy avenue awash with taxi cabs late at night can offer an eerie, unsettling reminder that the world is churning, multifaceted, glorious, and worth knowing.

This is dizzying, deeply affecting work. The understanding of the world that Lisa grows into is neither despairing nor necessarily optimistic, nor is it cynical. It is an affirmation that the world of others is complex, and refuses to bend to the histrionics of the interior world, teenaged or otherwise. Her phony deepness and facility with emotion become the forces that she grapples with most aggressively, and like any adult she will have to leave them behind if she wants to stop floating through the world.

A still image from the film

Nor’easter is complete! What a day.

David Lowery's Pioneer, shown outdoors

Amazing that I have not yet written about the edit, but given that we finished the film today, that seems like as good a reason as any to get around to it.

Nor’easter was edited by David Lowery, a writer/director from Texas by way of Wisconsin who has directed a number of films that is soon to grow by one. In early 2010, I sent him a message through Facebook (before we had ever met), asking for a copy of his feature, St. Nick. He obliged, and I offered him the editor job shortly afterward, though we still didn’t have the money to shoot. He obliged again and here we are.

When you see the film, you’ll see it’s a fairly precise effort with a lot of shots in it that have clearly been designed in advance. I expected that to make the edit a lot easier than it was, but as I have learned, you will always use what you have. I’m sure that if we had another month, or a month less, we would have finished on those deadlines too.

David is based in Austin, which meant that the early-going of our edit involved me meeting him, giving him the footage, and basically sending him on his merry way to put together an assembly. From there I gave him notes on his next few passes until he was able to come to Los Angeles for a few weeks to edit in person with me. I think that was when the movie came into its own – we did maybe five revisions in the space of two weeks and found much of its shape before he headed back to Austin.

Our composers, Saunder Jurriaans and Danny Bensi, sent along samples of what they were working on once we showed them a rough cut in July, and these were added and tweaked as the picture shifted under our feet. In all, we took twelve weeks to cut the thing, which is about what you’d expect for a movie of this length shot at the ratio we hit.

Working remotely was a pleasure for me – David is an easy fellow to get along with and a talented, well-read (viewed?) filmmaker with tastes very similar to my own. Our common vocabulary is deep, and our love for certain aspects of filmmaking overlapped nicely, so we were never strenuously at odds when deciding where to cut and how to find the story. For that I am grateful.

A bunch of good news all at the same time:

• Danny Burstein, who plays our mystery man, talks briefly and effusively about Nor’easter on NPR. You can hear him discuss our project around the 9:00 mark, though the whole interview is a good listen.
• Danny is currently starring in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies on Broadway. Now that they’ve officially opened, Danny is getting some heavy praise. This review from New York Magazine is about as good as any actor could ever ask for.
• Our editor, David Lowery, is also a great director – his short Pioneer won Best Short at SXSW last year, and his much-heralded 2009 feature St. Nick had a theatrical run earlier this year. It was recently announced that his upcoming feature, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints will be part of the Emerging Visions program put on by IFP and the Film Society of Lincoln Center during the New York Film Festival.

Congrats also to my former classmates Kate Barker and Lauren Wolkstein on their inclusion in the program.

Inside the Greene house. Photo by Lucas McNelly.

Nor’easter was part of Lucas McNelly’s A Year Without Rent project, and he put together a series of posts about working on our film that can be found here, here, and here.

Today I sent him a post I wrote as a kind of counter-point to his, focused on what it felt like to have finished the film.

Our Facebook page is up and running – please Like it and share it with anyone who might be interested.

A still from the film; February snow in Maine

The two days of interiors at our last multi-day location went much more smoothly than the first, thanks in no small part to the location’s owners, who we had been convinced would kick us out at a moment’s notice, but who in fact turned out to love our presence and stayed up with us until 4 or 5 a.m. each day to see us off. As I mentioned previously, these last days were a terrific run for Danny Burstein, who plays a pivotal role in the film and who delivered in ways above and beyond what I had hoped.

After wrapping the location in Hope, Maine, we finished our principal photography in Thomaston, Maine, at Athens Mediterranean Pizzeria in Thomaston, Maine. Funnily enough, we had scouted long and hard for a proper pizza place, but wound up choosing the one right across the street from our primary church interior location (where we had begun shooting a month before). Athens also happens to have a friendly and amenable owner (who makes his own brief cameo in the film) and the best pizza in the neighborhood. Not everyone hears Hamburger and Mushroom and doesn’t blink – so thanks to Josh and the many extras who turned out that night to help us along.

We wrapped at about 3 a.m., and my mother delivered more booze than I knew what to do with, so I drank as much of it as I could and then slept through the wake up call at 7 a.m. for our ferry and boat pick-ups. Ian also slept through said call, as did Veronica, I think. David Call, our intrepid lead, was the only one who woke up for our splinter crew shoot and managed to wake us all up by slamming on each door for about ten minutes a piece. We wrapped the shoot that afternoon with stupid hangovers and celebrated with a fairly obscene dinner up the coast at a lovely restaurant I can’t remember the name of.

I do remember sitting at the table with Ian, Veronica, and David, knowing that they had been the most significant collaborators I had had throughout the shoot and being grateful for having found each one of them in their own ways. I embarrassed myself again by ordering probably twice as much food and drink as anyone else at the table (I remember the waitress being surprised twice by the “and then…” look on my face as I was ordering), but looking down at my steak and onion rings and beer I felt grateful and happy, confident that we hadn’t left anything behind and that I would eventually be proud of whatever it would be that we would carve out of the hours of footage sitting back at the hotel.

Ian and I drove back to New York the next day to news about the earthquake and tsunamis in Japan. It rained non-stop from Rockland to New Haven, Connecticut, which was about six and a half hours. That was all I needed to know that fighting to shoot in February in Maine had been worth it, despite the brutal cold and the basically insane logistical problems that it gave us. The shoot is forever, and snow looks better than mud, and that’s that.

This photo was an inspiration when writing. "Rockland Light" by Sean Duggan.

The first day at our final location turned out to be the worst of the bunch, as it ended with me walking around in the rain, soaked to the skin despite wearing seven layers, and knowing I had been through several of the most stressful hours of my life. But as these nights often go, we left with some terrific footage, and the movie is far better for our having pulled ourselves through the environment we were faced with.

The location at which the climax of the movie takes place was debated a whole lot during pre-production, and though we had found several places that seemed acceptable, Veronica and Ian and I found ourselves driving around in late December going door to door in central Maine, looking for something that would knock our socks off.

It took a day of driving at twenty miles an hour, but we found it – a blueberry farm in Hope, Maine, with an enormous, sloping field covered in snow. The field was extraordinary in that it functioned as an enormous bounce card, meaning we could set up two 4K HMIs at the top of the field and bounce the light down into the driveway, simulating the moon in a natural, eerie way.

The owners, understandably, were reluctant to talk to us at first, and on our first visit, wouldn’t let us inside. But Veronica stayed in touch with them, and in the next month I took a trip from New Jersey just to visit with them. We agreed about the details of the production and I went back to prepare, confident that things would work out.

It wasn’t until we tried setting up those 4Ks that we realized the top of the field was made up of a one-lane driveway to a less-than-understanding neighbor of our more sympathetic owners. It would be (I think) three and a half hours before the lights could be set up, eventually on top of five feet of snow, with a finicky generator and several foxholes needing to be dug into the snowy hilltop.

During all that time, it misted and rained, which made for some terrific photography, but slowed the production considerably, and made me wonder whether we would make the day at all. But soon enough, the lights were up, the shots were shot, and I found myself watching the climax of the film on the monitor. I realized almost immediately that we had been witness to another set of weather-related miracles, and that the material had been elevated by simple shifts in the rain and available light with each new set up.

This night was interminable – we started the day wet and just got wetter and wetter. I feared the owners would kick us out. I worried that the neighbor I hadn’t met would tear down our primary light source just for kicks. And I knew that those things could derail the production. But things worked out, and it turned out the owners loved having us there, which is a surprise, to be honest. I assure you that when you see how Lisa designed their basement, you’ll agree.

The dolly goes here.

We traveled from the island on our day off to a new hotel on Route 1 in Rockland. The new hotel was more comfortable than our previous mainland spot, more spacious, and modern. I appreciated the mattress especially, given how grueling the schedule on the island had been and the amount of sleep I felt I’d need for the scenes we had yet to shoot. I find clear thinking at the end of these days is usually directly connected to how much food and sleep I’ve had, for better or worse.

We soon learned that the snow plow guy we’d paid a fairly handsome sum (by our standards) to plow access to a critical outdoor location had given up about 150 yards from the spot we’d told him to hit. This was unfortunate, given that there were no other roads to this particular place, and made especially unfortunate when I saw what a great job he’d done up until that point, not to mention the thigh-deep snow that covered the remaining distance. It was clear we would have a long day in front of us, given that our 300-pound dolly and about 30 feet of dolly track would need to make the trek through that snow along with us.

So David Call and Ian Bloom and I went to Home Depot and fetched some luan board, which is the seemingly unbreakable cardboard-like material that goes on the back of cheap bookcases. In addition, we bought four nice shovels and drove back to the hotel at ten miles an hour, holding the luan to the top of the rental with our very cold hands poking out the windows.

The grips has a not-so-funny laugh at the sight of the brand new shovels the next morning. No laughs at all for the luan. It was indeed a little slow going, but soon enough the team was able to roll the dolly out over the 150 yards of deep snow by laying down one sheet of luan, rolling the dolly, and leapfrogging the other sheet to make a ride-able path for it.

So out it went while Andreas, our intrepid Swede, built the platform and 30 yards of track the dolly would have to ride for one of our six shots scheduled that day.

And we got the shot. So, all in all, the luan scheme was a good one.

I remember, before all that happened, standing on the dirt and snow, waiting for Danny Burstein to arrive from the airport for his first day of work, realizing only then that if he showed up and wasn’t absolutely clear on what it was we needed from him, the entire film would fall apart that day. I’m being purposely vague at this point, but Danny’s character has a particular characteristic that makes him distinct from the others in the film. I hadn’t really had the time to ensure that Danny would know this side of his character as well as I needed him to, but my fears were allayed on his first take. So thanks, Danny.

The Grapes of Wrath

Don’t ask me how I ended up inside on the 4th of July watching The Grapes of Wrath. Doing so did seem like a proper summation of the way I live in a lot of ways, but that’s probably a post for some other time.

I found the movie far more powerful tonight than when I’d first seen it, outdoors in Bryant Park in New York, maybe 8 or 9 years ago. Back then I was seeing the Monday night outdoor screenings most weeks, making my way to the park at around 6 and holding down a blanket with friends until nightfall for the classic movie series that plays there in summer. I remember finding the movie fairly hokey, and a sad document of the traps mainstream cinema so often falls prey to when reconciling complex pieces of writing with the demands of the two-hour feature format.

Watching it tonight, I was reminded of how jarring it had been to watch grown men cry in American Dream, a documentary by Barbara Kopple about an ill-fated strike at a Hormel plant in Minnesota. I remember being pulled in by the natural drama of the strike, but feeling not so much a lack of compassion as a lack of understanding when the men broke down as they realized they were no longer able to provide for their families. I simply did not have the life experience to understand the extent to which providing for one’s family can be a core element of a person’s being.

Since then, I have gone through a number of big life changes – getting married, moving to support my spouse, finishing grad school, moving again, this time more permanently – and the number of elements in my life that feel preparatory has dropped. With most everything in my life, I now feel like I am doing what I have set out to do rather than getting ready for something else, and I feel like I better understand the burden that comes with having others depend on you, not to mention the stronger connection to home as a place of safety and development.

The complete and utter desperation embodied by the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath is truly extraordinary. Though the film ultimately cops out on its depiction of the Joad family specifically (and the poor working class in general), the stark, visceral power of Ford’s imagery can’t be overstated. Seeing a family home razed in seconds by a tractor that never stops and never slows is uncanny. The trust that the entire family puts in one flawed man is universal. The willingness to work for food but not to beg like an animal is simple and powerful.

I think it should also be noted that the sense of tragedy that hangs over the entire film does not seem to put the viewer in a superior position. It is not a farcical or even historically-distanced position that Ford creates for the viewer. Though he clearly gives the family certain showy charms, he meets their plight at their level (not ours) and roots it in their desires for home and dignity. Henry Fonda’s multifaceted criminal is sympathetic not just because he is trying to save his family from starvation, but because he demands that they be able to earn what they are given.

As a filmmaker, I simply do not have the opportunity to make as many films as my imagination warrants. The nature of the beast is that you have to pick and choose, and spend your time wisely. As a result, I spend as much time thinking about subjects as anything else. What are the things that are worth years of my time? The answers to that question are invariably things that are true, and things that have the power to captivate me, personally, forever. That ‘forever’ is surprisingly subjective and ever-shifting, but the subjects need to have the power to captivate again and again in whatever forms they take on over time.

As I mentioned in one of the first posts on this blog, the motivation for writing Nor’easter was not only the subjects of faith, naiveté, and control, but also the desire to address something from the real world that I did not fully understand. For me, the irrational bridge that exists between the existence of nothing and the existence of something is forever interesting.

Tonight I felt like The Grapes of Wrath was a film that was about a subject that could be endlessly interesting to me, but that hadn’t been when I first came to it. I think it speaks to the power and the truth in its subject that its meaning can shift so dramatically for me over the course of a few years. Still have no idea what moved my wife to play it on Independence Day but hey.