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.

• 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.

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.

Father Michael works here

As a unit we tried our best to take things easily for our last three days on the island – March 1-3. After our brutal Monday, and with Veronica’s car still in a ditch on North Haven Road, we were treated to the three least demanding days of the shoot.

On Tuesday, we shot scene 46, which takes place at Richard’s office, the only location we began production without having locked. Though my father had seen the property in the summer of 2009, I hadn’t followed up on it after seeing his photos, and we had never planned to shoot there. But when the first-choice location fell through, I sifted through my old location photos and was surprised to find that the photos were a lot more promising than I’d remembered. Given the nature of the island in winter, we had a lot of difficulty locating the property’s owner. By the time we did, we were already in the middle of the second week of the shoot and things were getting tight. We were eventually able to find the (very kind) artist who owns the construction and design space that appears in the film, and were able to shoot there with relatively little hassle.

My fondest memory of this location was when we went to scout it a few days before shooting, and Kit found a banjo, and then revealed that he could play banjo. As Veronica said, “I needed that.”

After walking into the location, Gareth, our trusty gaffer, started running his lighting ideas past Ian, our DP, and I remember Ian just telling him to forget putting any lights outside. Let’s take it easy today, he said. A good call given how brutal Monday had been. Soon, and for the first time, the camera was crashing because of the warmth of the location rather than the cold. That was a welcome change.

The next day saw not one, not two, but three gifts for the film’s photography. We shot a number of scenes that take place at Peggy’s house, and though we had to shoot them all in a row, they were written to take place on different script days. The weather shifted dramatically for each of the scenes, as if on cue, and blessed us with the snow-bound shot that appears near the beginning of the film. I couldn’t have been happier with how each one turned out. During the shifts of the weather, we ran outside and back in (twice) to grab a few exterior shots of David in the snow. Each one made it into the final cut.

Our last day was a short one, with two new actors making their one-day appearances felt. Camilla Gray and Bill Vaughan came out to the island to put in a day of work each and left a memorable impression on the production to say the least. We’re also very grateful for the house pictured above, whose owner was friendly to the point of allowing us not only to come inside, but to turn her china cabinet completely inside out. Even though everything was returned to its right place and nothing was broken, the fact that she was still smiling while the art department re-assembled her house at sundown was a good reminder of how impressively kind and generous the entire island was while helping us make this film.

Photo by my brother

By week three I was feeling a lot more confident in the production, and the fears of not finishing our days or letting the logistics of shooting on a frozen island get the better of us had subsided. As a production unit, we were certainly tired, but Sunday of that week was the last day inside the Greene family home, which told us we had completed the bulk of the heavy lifting on the island. We had a number of stunts (and two hell days) in front of us, but the first two days of the week were relatively calm.

On Sunday we shot a number of assorted things with Abby in and around her bedroom, and a scene (the content of which I won’t reveal) that has become one of my favorites in the film. For this scene it was clear from the first take that we would be able to execute the scene as I’d planned, in a single shot, without compromising the clarity of what happened in the moments off screen. In the scene, Abby’s brother opens the door to his bedroom and reveals what he’s done to his room after being left alone for only a few minutes. Ian took advantage of an interior skylight in the bedroom and shined a murky light down onto the two actors. Along with a few dangled branches just off camera to heighten the effect, he created a ghostly effect that I think will stick with people. Liam’s face is captivating in the scene, drawing the viewer in as I’d hoped it would.

We also shot the ending of the film on Sunday, and I was grateful for the amount of time the crew devoted to it. It takes place outside, and up until that day we had had a lot of trouble shooting in the area where we’d planned to end the film. The two previous scenes there had been cut short after only a few takes (though, having seen them, I don’t think the material suffers) because the weather had been so brutal. We caught a break on Sunday and were given a perfectly overcast sky with little wind, which made the 12 or so takes bearable. Richard and David were on point from the start, and our work became more about finding the right pace and tenor rather than the tone.

Monday was a peach. It was snowing when we woke up. Chapin lost control of Veronica’s car on the way to set and lodged it in a ditch. We put together a stunt that none of us was entirely sure the actors would live through, but after having navigated a car crash, the odds somehow seemed better for Richard. He’d been riding shotgun during the wreck but the stunt turned out to be a lot worse than that. I think he liked attacking David but who can say. Perks of being an actor, really. Then we shot five pages after lunch. Before that, Ian dropped the camera on the rocks outside David’s cabin. The whole thing did a barrel roll; the matte box went flying; it was a real sight.  Ian’s knee was destroyed but the bleeding stopped by the time it started really raining. We were soaking wet. Lunch was good. We had to shoot five pages after lunch. The most important five pages. Veronica’s car stayed in the ditch for about a day and a half, at like a sixty degree angle. We were already the talk of the town, but if there weren’t a film production going on this would have made us the talk of the town, because it really was there for a day and a half. Tow truck was off island. It took three days for her transmission to give out, though. If memory serves we wrapped almost on time.

Photo by my brother

Week 2 ended with scenes 86 and 87, inside the “vacation house.” Nor’easter’s midpoint is marked by these scenes, which feature the three children in the script – a brother, a sister, and her boyfriend – breaking into a house that’s been left under wraps for the winter. We shot the scene day for night, which is to say we blacked out the windows to simulate night while shooting in normal daylight hours.

Scene 87 is the longest in the script, and I was glad that we had a full day to shoot it. Our vacation house was actually a vacation house’s guest quarters, a single room that our production designer, Lisa, had expertly set up for us the day prior with a lot of opaque plastic and some big, fat lights that the owners had lying around. Ian, the photographer, flipped when he saw the enormous, warm sources that she’d found, and incorporated them into the scene, putting them directly in the frame a lot of the time, giving the scene a unique look. Coupled with the hanging plastic, these lights added a lot of gorgeous haze to the scene.

The weather was clear and relatively warm that day so I was amazed to find myself shivering as we started shooting. Blacking out the windows quickly turned the location back into a meat locker, so despite the break in the weather, we weren’t able to loosen up. The day went smoothly, but we had to make the most of our twelve hours. At the end of the day, we shot a couple of night exteriors showing the brother and sister’s approach to the vacation house, which gave us an opportunity to show off our fog machine and a few of our bigger lights. Ending the night in the snow-covered, moonlit woods, yelling back and forth to each other, was a memorable capper. I stared up at the trees while people found their places and celebrated the fact that we had shot out the primary locations on the island already and hadn’t left anything on the table.

Inside the cave

All I’m doing this week is watching dailies, so a brief aside before I go nuts from watching the fruits of your labors for another hour:

Carey and I went to the Arclight with another couple last weekend to see Werner Herzog’s latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It’s a 3-D production about the Chauvet caves of southern France, where the oldest paintings known to man were found. Since its discovery, the cave’s importance has been universally recognized and the age of the paintings repeatedly confirmed through scientific testing. It seemed like a good idea for a movie so I went into it expecting something of a travelogue and Discovery channel featurette rolled into one.

What I got was instead one of the most profound experiences I have ever had in a theater. The paintings, done by some of the earliest homo sapiens, are remarkably beautiful and technically strong. They’re insightful, playful, animated, expressive, layered. And seeing them preserved so flawlessly (by a fortunately-timed rockslide that sealed off the cave from the environment) is breathtaking.

What elevates the material even further is Herzog’s utter reverence for the artistic process. He interviews scientists and artists, historians and perfumers, all with an attention to the interviewee’s inner life. What struck me most remarkably was the idea (causally brought up by one historian) of the inner landscape. Our inner lives are overlooked by most today, and success is equated with ownership almost exclusively in western culture. The value that Herzog gives to feelings and dreams wasn’t quite revelatory to me, but it was a wake-up call that I needed. Editing is sometimes a balancing act of clarity and expressiveness, and when focusing on continuity and cause and effect it can be easy to overlook the value of novelty or the amusement that unexpected elements bring. The unexpected aside can create  a broader sense of drama without feeling tacked on.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams forces the viewer to face truly incomprehensible passages of time while simultaneously communicating the desires of people tens of thousands of years dead. They seemed at times identical to my own. It made me believe in reconstitution and a collective unconscious, even though, I don’t think, that was ever considered the subject of the film.

The Greene House Interior; photo by Ian Bloom

After splitting our first day between the mainland and island, we bunkered down at the Tidewater Motel on main street in Vinalhaven for what would be a two-week stay. The island was very cold and the motel is situated directly over the water, so many of the rooms needed additional heat in order for us to get through the night. It took a few days for us to work out the kinks, but thanks to the hard work and helpful attitude of Phil, its owner, we were able to get each member of the cast and crew situated. Phil normally keeps the motel closed for January and February because of just how few people come and go from the island in those months, but he opened it up for us for two weeks and for that we’re very grateful – we wouldn’t have had a central place to lodge the cast and crew otherwise, and it was valuable to gather for meals and what little leisure time we had. (Hello, Oscar broadcast.)

The week was spent on a single estate on the north side of the island that served for multiple script locations. The property is incredibly beautiful, but it’s located right on the waterfront, and the front yard of the estate is essentially a big ramp from the ocean to the buildings that housed the production. We had scouted the place several times in 2009 and 2010, including the December and January leading up to the shoot. The property had seemed cold then, but manageable, so we decided to move forward with a February shoot in large part because we thought we would be able to manage the elements at the estate (where we would spend 9 of the 21 days of principal photography). Well, February was much colder, windier, and snowier than the preceding months, and we found ourselves in weather-related binds most days at the estate.

Our first day there was especially grueling. David was the only cast member on set, and we had a number of scenes to shoot in the priest’s house, which is an uninsulated, one-room house on the waterfront. We were underprepared for the cold (zero degrees) and wind (thirty miles an hour), and I found myself getting through the day by setting hourly goals and focusing on the compositions one at a time. It was difficult but David and the crew kept a good attitude and we wrapped on time.

Week 2 also gave us our first day inside the Greene family home, where a lot of Nor’easter’s drama takes place. It was a location my father had scouted for me nearly two years before, and I had been looking forward to photographing it for nearly as long as I’d been writing the script. Shooting scenes 12, 13, 14, and 15 inside the house, when our priest meets the father of the missing boy for the first time, was deeply satisfying. Seeing the way the living room was designed by Lisa and lit by Ian was a relief, and knowing that we were doing justice to the home and the environment as well as the drama let me sleep well at night. Add to that the gorgeous snowstorm we received that morning for David’s approach to the house, and I spent most of the day feeling like I was opening a gift.

View from the ferry at dawn; picture by Michael Brotzman

Week two began with an odd day – we had spent our rainy day off on the mainland, which meant part of our next day of production would take place on the island ferry. In Nor’easter, our priest travels back and forth from the island several times, so those scenes were shot together, in an hour-and-a-half window while we rode the ferry to Vinalhaven. Veronica and I had originally planned this part of the production for a full round trip plus a one-way trip, but we decided to knock it out in just a single one-way trip when we finalized the schedule, and that turned out to be enough for what we were after.

Ian, our DP, did especially great work on the boat, and the production was able to operate smoothly, in large part because we happened to be nearly alone. With so few people traveling back and forth from Vinalhaven in February, we were able to manage the many silent, lonely rides in the boat’s cabin with the kind of isolation we were seeking.

We arrived on the island, grabbed a few good shots of the priest coming and going near the ferry terminal, and then headed off to what became one of the greatest surprises of the entire production. Scene 16 directly follows our priest’s first big failure in the script, and I had written it to happen immediately after that failure. The scene takes place at a stone quarry that has been filled with water and frozen over, and I hoped that the sense of peace there would contrast the fight that the priest had just gone through. As written, it ought to have been shot at around 10 in the morning.

After our morning on the ferry, though, we realized that the complexity of the shots we’d planned was going to keep us from shooting until around 3pm. After I read through the script and realized it wouldn’t affect the continuity of the movie to adjust, we set up for scene 16 and were blessed with the most extraordinary light of the entire shoot.

What I had written as a simple series of shots – what amounted to our priest happening upon a moment of intimacy between two kids and then choosing to spy on them – became an extraordinary composition, courtesy of Ian and the timing of the sun. When we turned around to do David’s coverage, I pushed the production to hurry and capture the flickering light that managed to both illuminate and obscure parts of David’s face in a way that felt peaceful, natural, and bizarre all at once. It was a gift.

This was one of the many days during the production that I felt the crew’s work and the elements in general collaborated to elevate the material to something that felt beyond any individual’s command. Watching the dailies I was proud that we’d delivered something that could heighten the aesthetic of the film and also our sense of David’s character in a simple moment.

After the days in the church when I felt we were, at times, pushing our compositions into square, predictable spaces for the purposes contrast to what we knew the film would later be, it was another enormous relief to see that moments in the woods and on the ice could feel both earthly and magical at once without bleeding into sentimentality.

Picture by Rachel Brosnahan

We shot only one day at the church exterior in Port Clyde, Maine, which proved to be more than enough time for what we had scheduled. After getting through the first three days of the shoot and finally realizing that we were going to be able to make our days as planned, I was able to relax and keep my eyes open much more effectively.

Keeping my eyes open, or making sure I’m looking at the real people and the real landscape (and the opportunities both bring) is something I try to remind myself to do when on set. This can be especially tricky when shooting digitally with such a clear, crisp HD monitor setup. Ian’s compositions and attention to detail were terrific to the point of being seductive, so I had to work to avoid becoming complacent and too easily satisfied.

Throughout the shoot, at different times, each of the actors asked me what the production felt like – ironically the people you see on screen are often the people who spend the least number of hours involved in the production – and the feeling I wanted to discuss was not of a weight coming off my shoulders but rather a relief in my heart that dialogue was clear, that emotions were legible, that we were executing delicate material with a technically strong hand so that the ideas could be engaged.

The first such experience was inside the church listening to David recite the Lord’s Prayer, and the second was outside the church on day four, watching Haviland perform the long opening dialogue scene that establishes the circumstances that create the story’s drama. Knowing that that was legible, clear, and done without any unnecessary histrionics gave me a kind of relief that eventually turned into confidence as the shoot went on. It was not the first time I was grateful for what the others were doing for the film and the subject matter, nor would it be the last, but it was the first time I was really able to appreciate it. We were outside, the weather had cooperated remarkably well, and I felt like we were over-achieving again.

The next day was our first day off, and it poured rain all afternoon. I spent the day going over footage at the hotel with Ian.

Here’s an album of production photos from the camera of Steven Harris, our art director.

We had originally scheduled our first day of production as a particularly light one, I think because we weren’t sure we would be able to get our act together in what could have been extreme weather in a new location, but a week before shooting, our new Assistant Director, Kit, decided that we should treat it just like any other day on the schedule and expect the professionals we were working with to do their jobs. He was right, and we made the first day just a hair under schedule.

I have to say that that first day was a real catharsis for me. Seeing Veronica in the church basement supervising the meals and organizing the production drove home how far the production had actually come, and knowing that the camera was finally turning over in a location I was happy with, behind performances I was satisfied with, gave me a lot of confidence.

Our efforts to execute our plan to its best, though, had only begun. Shooting in the church was fraught with a lot of stress (not least of which came from watching dolly grips sling eight foot pieces of steel track over their shoulders, less than a foot or two from enormous, irreplaceable stain glass windows).

The material we shot on those first days was, luckily, expected to be the most straightforward and square, as I tended to call it. So being a little tentative felt all right. But by day three we were itching to get more adventurous with our compositions.

• David Call, our priest.
• Liam Aiken, our missing boy.
• Richard Bekins, the boy’s father.
• Haviland Morris, his mother.
• Rachel Brosnahan, his sister.
• Danny Burstein, a man on the mainland.

We also have a number of local actors rounding out our cast:

• Geary Smith, a local police officer.
• Bill Vaughan, a former priest now working as a groundskeeper.
• Peggy Muir, one of the two remaining members of the church.

We are traveling to Maine this weekend to prepare for shooting on Monday in Thomaston.

I stopped counting early in 2010, but I believe as of today, we’re pushing up against forty drafts of the thing. In doing that much revision, reading, and workshopping of the script, I have slowly learned the level of fluency with my material that I believe is necessary when producing a film. The elements are probably predictable to anyone who’s ever read a book on filmmaking – drama, action, motivation, justification – but they’ve been very difficult for me to pin down when writing. Scripts often feel to me like they could turn in any direction at any time, and if, like me, you’ve never felt total fluency with your material, it’s hard to know when you’re there.

So much of Nor’easter was originally based in ideas, concepts, and un-actable, non-dramatic premises that I am almost embarrassed to look back at the early versions. I also rushed to share it with others, a predictable result of beginning the script in a writing class (where I was required to show it). But the three-year long development process I fell into forced me to build my knowledge of the world, the characters, their rationales, and their choices, and to justify it all with my developing sense of what I was trying to communicate to the viewers about youth and faith. I am so grateful for it and for those who put me through it, because it’s only because of this process that I can answer the questions my new collaborators ask me about the world we are creating.

About a year ago, when I thought we might be only a few weeks away from production, a close collaborator could sense that I was growing impatient with the seemingly endless revisions, and urged me to enjoy the process. The process is long, but looking at the track records of my favorite filmmakers, it appears natural. Recognizing that, and actually feeling it with my own script, has taken all the rush out of the production.

I started writing Nor’easter back in the fall of 2007 as a classroom assignment for Screenwriting 3 in Columbia’s MFA program. Screenwriting 3 and 4, which are taken by all writing or directing students in their third and fourth semesters at the school, are a sequence in which students write a feature-length screenplay under the direction of a single teacher. I worked with Lewis Cole, a distinguished professor of writing at the school who is responsible for overhauling the program in the 90s and making it the narrative-focused (rather than documentary-focused) program that it is today.

When I was considering what to write, I remembered an article written by Ray Carney, an influential professor of film at Boston University, in which he said to film who you really are and film what you don’t know about it.

The idea that you should write what you know is nothing new, but the idea that you should address what you don’t know is an extremely novel concept in filmmaking as far as I’m concerned. The vast majority of films are crafted experiences intended to tell us what the filmmaker is sure of – to create an experience that the filmmaker is in control of and that he or she could likely tell you about before you have it. It was challenging to me to consider attempting to make something that would be beyond my preconceptions, but it was a challenge I wanted, because I knew that the filmmakers I loved, John Cassavetes, Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson, and others, had been willing to do it.

The subjects that I chose were Maine and faith. Maine was easy, it is where I was born and the place I still identify myself with. Faith, on the other hand, was a subject I was only beginning to think of, and the extraordinary breadth of the subject intimidated me and made me want to try to collect my thoughts into something coherent.

Nor’easter is a document of that understanding of faith that I have come to – practical, applied, simple, and in certain interpretations of it, at odds with our natural states. In writing the script I have become much more interested in economics and politics than I ever was before, largely through my desire to understand our natural states and what it means to craft a system that is at odds with that state. Such systems rarely succeed in the long run, as far as I can see.