Some of you have noticed that I haven’t posted here in a minute––almost exactly two months. That’s because I’ve been busy. I’m pleased to be able to share with you exactly what has been keeping my attention during that time.
This is my most recent post:
At the end of it, I write: “So now: I’m making a movie. And when it’s done, I’m going to make another. And then I’ll make another[.]”
That movie that I was referring to is actually not complete––it’s a ~20 minute short called Housepainter that’s in post-production still. But the second one (“I’m going to make another”) is done. Linearity is old hat, anyway; why not make your second movie first?
If you want to go in blind besides the screenshot above, and have approximately seven and a half minutes to spare, feel free to take a moment to enjoy Keys before I continue:
I have ADHD. I don’t see this as a defining feature of my essence, nor a disability, nor anything else except a data point that I have to take into account. It is what it is. Lately, what that’s meant is trying to harness it instead of fight against it, ride it like Paul Atreides on a sandworm. So when I get into the doldrums on a project, I’ve trained myself to go do something else instead and then circle back. Always moving, like a shark. I was getting bogged a little down in editing Housepainter; I needed to do switch gears to something else for a bit. Hence: Keys.
My intellectual instinct as an artist is to follow David Lynch’s lead and let the art speak to itself; unfortunately, I’m an overly self-reflective motormouth nerd, so I don’t think that will do. Maybe some day.
There’s a theme I keep returning to in the ideas that interest me. So much of society is maintained by a loose agreement to Be Cool. There are laws, yes, and social mores, and other arrangements in place, but these are all predicated on a willingness to follow them. I’m interested in what happens when someone decides not to follow them anymore. If someone truly wants to hurt you, and they’re not overly concerned with the consequences, they’ll almost certainly figure out a way to do it. If someone wants to steal from you, they can do it. If someone wants to enter your private spaces without your consent, they can do it. There’s only a social contract in place preventing these things––so what happens when someone breaks that contract?
That’s what Keys is about, in a fundamental sense, to me. It’s what Housepainter is also about, to a degree. That sort of exploration of deviance interests me.
Of course, it’s also about whatever else you want it to be about. That’s the nature of art.
Keys is an experiment, which is not to say that it’s not intended to be taken as a movie, as a narrative––it is, of course. But it’s also an attempt to do something specific: to see to what extent I could make a coherent film as close to entirely by myself as possible. (There is one sequence that’s an exception, which is three shots during the break-in; for these, my lovely wife Lucia Fasano provided supplementary camera work).
The film began with the central monologue. I set up the camera and locked it tight on my face so that it wasn’t clear where I was; I want the audience to come to their own conclusions on this. Then: I talked. I had a loose idea of what I was going to say, but the monologue is improvised. I ran it three times, different each time, and kept the third. I built the rest of the film from there––capturing B-roll where I could and piecing together the subjective experience of this person’s life. There are a few neat tricks in the impressionistic cutaway segments that I’m proud of––one, where I manually rack focus onto my hand holding a key while remaining on camera without that action being noticed; another, where to shakily simulate the experience of walking up to a door, I simply put the camera on a strap around my neck and hurriedly walked forward and then backwards, which gave it (I flatter myself) a jittery Raimi or Lynch kind of feel.
The shot at the top of this article is one I’d thought about for years. In early 2024, Sean T. Collins wrote an essay I haven’t been able to stop thinking about called We Ask That You Refrain From Talking About Your Experience in the Structure (you’ll have to scroll midway down this link for the particular piece, under that headline). In it, Collins discusses “surveillance cinema,” particularly in the context of The Zone of Interest, Skinamarink, and The Curse (three of my favorite releases of 2023). What all three have in common is what Paul Schrader describes in Transcendental Style in Film as the “surveillance camera,” one of the three modes of transcendental filmmaking. In this, the camera makes its presence known––like a surveillance camera or a voyeur, it’s an object in a place. See one of my favorite examples, from The Curse, included in the above Collins piece but worth highlighting here:
The lady in the foreground is not one of our characters. I mean, she is, I suppose, but she’s not. She’s incidentally there, where the camera is. Our real characters are through the window, having a heated, private discussion. So why aren’t we out there with them? Because the camera is an object in a space. Like a voyeur, it has to find an angle, stretch around corners, peek through windows. The characters are antagonistic to the camera; they want to hide. So we chase them. Which means, sometimes, finding odd or inconvenient angles, whatever opportunity we can. It’s uncanny; it makes us accomplices in a violation of privacy, an intrusion into private spaces. This is, of course, what our unnamed protagonist does in Keys, and so I wanted to have at least some sequences where the camera feels like a presence. In the kitchen shot from the top of this piece, when the perspective moves outside, we hear night-time ambiance, and the pulsating heartbeat in the protagonist’s ears is quieted, because we are no longer inside with him. We are now outside, watching him intrude. He should be with us, but us passively watching makes us, as an audience, complicit in his actions. That’s the point here as well:
This shot was deceptively easy––it’s just a Ring camera’s live view screen recorded on an iPhone. But it has that same intrusive feeling.
I could go into detail like this on every decision (the score, for instance, is my John Carpenter homage, just two chords repeating on a synth string section), but I won’t. And to be clear, I’m not trying to toot my own horn here––a one-man-band experiment done in part as a palette cleanser to avoid getting into the weeds on another project is not The Zone of Interest. I’m not saying all of this to brag or crow––I’m saying it because it isn’t really all that hard. Something I bang on about on Twitter all the time is that, yes, filmmaking has barriers to entry like any art form, but they’re not as high as we tell ourselves. You don’t need $20m to make your movie. You don’t need big movie stars or 35mm film or to build a city in Tunisia. You can get interesting effects in your backyard with a Ring camera. You just have to go do it. If there’s one message I can spread it’s to just go do it.
I hope that you enjoyed Keys and I hope you enjoy what I’ve got in the hopper next for you. Even if you didn’t, though, I hope you go make something of your own, and when you do, send it to me. The big arts and entertainment institutions are having a rough go of it; let’s keep making our own.