Hortsmann and Harvie’s “Bodyslam” Finally Available

Playing on iTunes

Hortsmann and Harvie’s “Bodyslam” Finally Available

(from Sag Harbor Express Online 3/24/17)

In May of 2015, I posted an interview here with John Paul Hortsmann and Ryan Harvie, the directors of the uplifting, sweet-spirited wrestling documentary, Bodyslam: Revenge of the Banana. It had just made a splash at the Tribeca Film Festival and I wrote that it fit my category Movies That Should Play in Sag Harbor. It never played in Sag Harbor or off the festival circuit. Until now. The directors have just alerted me that “Morgan Spurlock came on board as Executive Producer and Bodyslam is being released by Virgil Films. On March 28, it will be available for purchase in stores and playing on iTunes.

As I wrote in the introduction to the interview: “The directors found their story and its intriguing cast of social misfits at the Re-bar, a gay-friendly club on Howell Street, where once a month this intrepid and talented troupe of performers with outlandish monikers and wild costumes put on a raucous show that mixes wild, over-the-top wrestling with burlesque, parody, soap opera, and even political satire–if you want to see “Senator John McCain” manhandled by Ronald McFondle, this is where to go! In the documentary, Ronald McFondle, played by Josh Black, and Eddie Van Glam, played by Bill Bates, are the two Seattle Semi-Pro Wrestlers the directors focus on, in and out of costume. The other main figure is Paul Richards, who wrestles as The Banana, until he is exiled for not making an effort to become part of the very tight SSP wrestling family–becoming instead an outcast among outcasts. A woman scorned is nothing compared to a Banana out for revenge, and the spiteful Paul cleverly uses the law to shut down the SSP. And the movie moves from the ring to the Capitol. I saw Bodyslam at the TFF out of curiosity and it turned out to be a nice surprise, not at all what I expected and one of my favorite documentaries at the festival. Going in, I figured I’d cheer the wrestling onscreen, but I ended up sincerely rooting for the fascinating underdog characters in the movie in regard to their personal problems and for the SSP to come back from extinction. Also, I was thankful to the directors for bringing an entirely new subculture to the screen. Who knew?”

I was delighted to have this conversation with Horstman, Harvie, Black, and Bates. (The wrestlers even let me try on their championship belt!) I am pleased to share it again.

(Left to right) John Paul Horstmann, Josh Black/Ronald McFondle, Bill Bates/Eddie Van Glam and Ryan Harvie.

Danny Peary: Ryan and John, in your Directors Statement, you say that for your film to work it “had to be funny as hell.” For me, it’s the poignancy of your film that comes across more than the hilarity. There is humor but it comes from your characters, who are funny but are just as often serious. So I’m wondering if you still tell people first thing that this is a funny movie.

John Paul Horstmann: That Directors Statement was written a while ago, before we realized Bodyslam would turn out to be a much more serious film than we expected it be. It really surprised us that once we started cutting the scenes together, we kept finding these poignant moments and we exploded them and we explored them and found more heart than in the jokes. So you hit on something. I always think that in humor there’s a lot of pain and consequence, and I really like the juxtaposition of the two.

Ryan Harvie: Yeah, I think this movie is funny-serious. It’s about family, and family is always funny.

DP: Tell me about the tone of the movie. How did you structure it so you always keep it bit humorous even when the characters are talking about sad things?

JPH: We used humor as a hook, and we placed all the interesting stuff underneath it.

Paul, The Banana (in background) and Lucas, The Second Banana.

RH: No one wants to be depressed for eighty minutes, so we structured the film so that there is always something else going on when it’s too serious. For example, when Paul is telling a sad story, you’re seeing on the screen the wrestling he watched as a child and there’s a feeling of nostalgia and happiness. So while you’re getting some sad information and learning about all these people, you’re not depressed for the whole movie.

JPH: You get inside the person, then you understand him, then you develop great empathy, and then you feel a lot better than you would if he were just to look into the camera and deliver a long speech about how he was once abused or something else like that.

DP: Ryan, I read that the origin of your documentary is that you were told about the wrestling show in Seattle by a college friend who wrestles in it as the Second Banana. Where were you at the time?

RH: I was in Los Angeles and my friend Lucas and I met up for drinks when he came down from Seattle for a video game conference. He started telling me about this wrestling show he was in, saying “I dress like a banana and other guys dress in zany costumes and there’s all this crazy stuff.” And I was enthralled. It seemed amazing so I told John Paul about it and we both became obsessed with the idea. So we went up to Seattle, where we’d never been, and started shooting, and from watching the wrestling show, meeting these guys, and seeing their dynamics behind the stage, we realized, “There’s something here, something beyond these wrestling characters.”

DP: Bill, or Eddie Van Glam, when you guys found out that Ryan and John were making a movie about you, did you say, “Why are they doing this?” Or were you saying, “This is a really good idea!”?

Bill Bates: When they first approached us, we didn’t quite know what to make of it. They were saying, “We want to tell your story.” And we were like, “Cool, if that happens, great! If anything we’ll have footage of our shows.”

DP: At the beginning, was the idea for you to tell your stories or just for them to see the show you put on?

Josh Black: I think at first they came to the show just to check it out. They’d heard about our shows and what we do, and they just wanted to see it for themselves and get a feel for it and see what we were about. The story kind of evolved after the fact.

DP: Do these shows take place at a gay club?

JB: They take place at the Re-bar, and in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it was very much a gay club. They still have gay dance nights and house nights, and they have the Dina Martina Drag Show, and a lot of theater.

DP: Are any of the performers in the drag shows also wrestlers?

JB: No, I don’t think any of the drag people have ever wrestled, but Ronald McFondle does a lot of drag shows. McFondle’s “mother” is Jackie Hell, who is a local drag queen, and she has come out to the ring with me a couple of times to be McFondle’s manager.

DP: How many SSP wrestlers are there?

BB: Right now it’s about 22 guys.

DP: Who writes the scripts for the shows?

JB: It’s not one person who writes all the scripts. Everyone gets to tell their own little stories, and one person—which was me for a long time—must oversee those stories and make sure everything fits. It’s a three-ring circus, and you want comedy and violence and physicality, and technical wrestling. Also you need to make sure everyone’s doing their own things, but you want to make sure you’re not doing the same things all night long.

DP: Are the storylines like soap operas, as they are in the WWE?

JB: The most ridiculous soap operas ever.

DP: Does the audience care who wins?

JB: I’ve been champion a few times but I lose a lot, too. The audience understands we’re telling stories that last six months to a year, so match by match they’re not too much concerned with who wins, because they know we’re telling this story. When it comes to the final match of the feud between characters, then you have them invested in the outcome.

BB: We have season finales…

JB: We have shows once a month. People come back, they come early and grab front-row seats and load up on beer cans.

DP: Which they used to throw at the wrestlers.

BB: A lot of people bring their friends, and once they’ve seen it, they tell their friends. This past Saturday we were standing room only.

DP: Did you guys have a mission statement when you started out?

JB: Not really. We started in 2003, with us wrestling for fun between girls at burlesque shows. It all grew so organically. And then all of a sudden we’re selling out the Re-bar every month.

DP: Are you becoming better wrestlers as the years go by?

JB: Yeah. Well, when we started we didn’t have a lot of physicality, and it was really goofy and theatrical. There was a lot of rolling around and slap-fights, like The Three Stooges. We now have a ring, and we’re a lot of closer to actual wrestlers than when we started.

DP: Are you curious about how you’d do in the ring with professionals?

JB: I’ve done some indie stuff, some more traditional wrestling. It’s not an aspiration for me to wrestle professionally for a living, but it’s a fun thing to do once in a while.

DP: I grew up watching wrestling. Did you guys?

JB: When I was a kid, wrestling was on Saturday mornings, and my grandpa and I would fight about it all the time, because he was an NWA guy who loved Ric Flair and I loved “Macho Man” Randy Savage, who was in the WWF. He hated the pageantry and he still thought it was real and believed NWA was more raw and realer. All that WWF stuff he couldn’t stand–he thought the wrestlers were clowns–so we argued about it all day long.

DP: Did you know wrestling was fake as a kid?

JB: My mom was at the screening the other night, and she told me that when I was 8, I used to just scream at her when she told me it was fake. I didn’t believe it for a second. By the time I was a teen I obviously knew.

DP: What about you, Bill? You’re not a huge guy but growing up did you have aspirations to be a wrestler?

BB: I originally did. I found out about wrestling when I was 9 years old, I saw a magazine with Papa Shango on the cover, and it was so amazing because it was like a real live-action comic book and there were these over-the-top characters, and they were real–I could touch them physically if I went to the show. So I fell in love with the theatrics of it and the storylines, and then as I got older I appreciated the athleticism and the drama that it provided. I remember being a junior in high school, and thinking, “You know, I could actually pursue this. If I go to the gym and start eating right and look into it, I could actually do it.” My family did everything in their power to make sure I didn’t do it. My mother died when I was 22 and I had lost my family by then so I just dove straight into work because that’s all I had and I had only me to take care of. Then when I was 25, a friend said, “Hey, there’s this wrestling show I heard about. I’m not a wrestling fan but I know you are so do you want to go?” “Yeah! If there’s live wrestling in Seattle, I want to experience this!”

DP: Ryan, after you met the SSP wrestlers, did you think that 100% of these men had troubled lives before they found this home and makeshift family?

RH: Some guys did and some guys didn’t.

DP: I am not asking insultingly, but was anyone completely together?

RH: The Second Banana had a troubled history, and so did some other guys, but the way the organization is, with its open-door policy that lets everyone in, if you’re looking for a family, then you have found the place to have it.

JPH: A lot of the guys say they don’t have anybody else, except for the other wrestlers.

JB: A lot of the wrestlers are people like me. I didn’t have a horrible past, I just wanted to get out of North Dakota because it was too small for me. All my family is back there and when I moved out here I was all by myself. A lot of us are just transplants from the Midwest who didn’t have anyone in Seattle. And we found each other.

DP: Ryan, do you see the bonding theme, the brotherhood among the wrestlers, as being the main thrust of your film?

RH: It comes across in their shows and hopefully in our footage that they love each other beyond anything else, and that I think is a really beautiful thing.

DP: The wrestlers in the movie have become a family, but do any still have strong connections to their own families?

BB: My dad is my best friend, I love my father, but there’s no way in hell I’m moving to Atlanta. He finally came to a show and he saw what I built and what I have with these guys. My dad’s actually in the movie, in the front row at a show. He had a blast, and he “got it”—finally when he saw the show and he met everybody, he was like, “OK, I’m not going to ask you to move to Atlanta, because I get it.” Because he knows I love him with all my heart.

DP: Was he impressed by how athletic you are?

BB: Yes and no, because I had always tried my hand at various sports. I just didn’t really keep to one sport to see how good I could be. I was like, “I tried it, so it’s time to move on.” But I always loved wrestling, so for him to see me wrestle for the first time was very special. He he finally got to see me live my dream.

DP: In the Directors’ Statement, you say, “Basically this film is about truth in even the most ridiculous moments.”  Please elaborate.

JPH: As we also say in our statement, there is beauty even in the most ugly or ridiculous moments and the most banal situations can have deeply interesting subtexts. Even though we may chuckle at our characters’ eccentricities, we can also identify with their situations.

RH: The truth always comes through. When someone totally believes in what they are doing, whether it’s jumping off a ladder or rubbing clown paint on themselves, that is who they are and it’s their true self that shines through in this film. What I found is that these characters live such interesting lives and are so compelling that you can identify with their situations and feelings even if you don’t dress up like a clown and bodyslam people. There are universal concepts that everyone experiences.

DP: The story takes a really weird turn when Paul, the original Banana, is let go and gets his revenge by alerting the authorities about minor code infractions at the wrestling shows. The result is your show is shut down and the wrestling stops. Josh, after testifying before a surprisingly sympathetic legislative panel, is SSP wrestling functioning in the same way as before at the Re-bar?

JB: Well, if we don’t charge for admission or require a cover charge, we are allowed to do the show. So right now we’re doing that and basically paying out of pocket. But I’m working with the Department of Licensing, and we’re co-authoring a bill to change the laws that need to be changed, hopefully by 2016.

DP: You have always been billed as semi-pros, so were you getting paid before the shutdown?

JB: Before we were shut down we had a cover charge. Mainly it would be to pay the bar tab for all of us to drink after the show, and to promote the show with handbills and posters. Also it paid for making costumes.

RH: You guys didn’t take a salary. You put your money back into it.

JB: None of us ever walked away with cash. We do a lot of charity stuff, too.

BB: Donations to homeless shelters. If we have anything extra.

DP: Let’s talk about Paul, The Banana. He was a really quiet guy yet John Paul and Ryan you were able to befriend him enough so that he was honest with you in the film.

RH: We had to earn his trust. He opened up as a villain just not so emotionally.

JPH: It took almost two years before he opened up. One day, he was on the steps of his house, where you see him in the film, and he just randomly started talking.

DP: Was most of that interview in which he spoke about mother filmed in one day?

JPH: We were interviewing him for a whole day, asking about his house, and then he came out onto the steps, and we turned the camera around.

RH: He’d been rebuilding the house by himself, and we said, “Just show us what you’ve been doing,” and then he started talking about how his mother died on the front porch that he was repairing. It was like a valve opened up and we were very happy he felt comfortable and honest with us.

DP: When watching the movie, Josh, were you hearing Paul’s story for the first time?

JB: Yeah. I had no idea about his past and his mother and all that. He really never said anything much to us except for hello and yes and no, and often he just nodded his head. He never opened up to us. He tried to hang out with us but he’d come to the bar and stand awkwardly to the side. We tried to pull conversation out of him, but he just never opened up with us. I think it’s because he didn’t like that we drink and whatever. So when trying to get him to open up to us when we were all at a bar, we had no idea that drinking bothered him so much. And that was probably a big barrier to him getting closer to us.

BB: It really felt like he was always passing judgment on us.

JB: I’m the type who if I’m busting your balls is saying, “I like you.” But I think he took a lot of the in-jest, busting balls things I said as Josh being an asshole.

BB: I wasn’t the nicest guy back in the day, either.

DP: Ryan, if the wrestlers admit that they blew it with this guy, what do you think Paul’s reaction would be if they asked him to return to the show?

RH: I actually don’t know what Paul would say. I think he would love to wrestle again, but the thing I’ve learned about wrestling is that it’s about trust, and when that trust is broken, it’s hard to rebuild that back. He would have to rebuild that trust.

BB: Wrestling is about trusting your opponent to protect you and about protecting each other. And without that trust, you don’t know if someone is going to get hurt…

DP: Is the anger you have toward Paul too much ever to overcome?

JB: I haven’t seen him since he walked out of that last show, but on a personal level I’d love to shake his hand and bury the hatchet. I don’t want to hold hate and grudges. As far as being back in the show, what stands in the way is the trust issue and not knowing if someone could be hurt. I don’t think I could ever let him back in to perform, but I’d love to be OK with him.

BB: If he ever wanted to come to a show– like Josh, I’d love to just bury the hatchet, shake hands, and apologize for anything I ever said to him.

DP: Would you want an apology from him, too?

BB: Yeah, I think he definitely owes us one, too.

DP: If you watch westerns or war movies, it’s usually about an outsider coming in and eventually learning how to conform to the group. The rare exception is when the group conforms to the guy. Looking back, did you give Paul what he needed, or was he a hopeless case?

JB: We gave him a million opportunities to talk to us, he just doesn’t talk. Communication is key in any relationship but there was no communication with him. He thought I was bullshitting about taking the banana suit off him. I loved what he was doing as a heel, and with his wrestling, but it just didn’t work with that Banana suit on. If we just gave him cheap shades, a vest, and the blazer, he could have acted the way he wanted to as the Banana and he would have been an awesome heel. But the character of the Banana wasn’t supposed to be a heel. Paul wouldn’t listen to us about this, so we had to tell him to leave.

RH: For me, this movie is all about family, and a guy who’s looking for a family, Paul, who finds a family and doesn’t know what to do once he has that family.

DP: So he blows his opportunity and loses his family. Poor guy.

Onur Tukel Pushes Sandra Oh and Anne Heche into a “Catfight”

Playing in Theaters

Onur Tukel Pushes Sandra Oh and Anne Heche into a “Catfight”

(from Sag Harbor Express Online 3/3/17)

Sandra Oh and Anne Heche filming the first fight, in a stairwell.

By Danny Peary

If you happen to spot a bearded and slightly mad man handing out cards this week near the Cinema Village on 12th Street off University in Manhattan or the Spectacle Theater, at 124 S. 3rd Street in Brooklyn, please don’t cross to the other side of the street but take one and engage in conversation. That imposing yet gentle soul is actually one of New York’s finest independent filmmakers, having written and directed Richard’s Wedding, Summer of Blood, and Applesauce, my choice of best narrative film at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival–all slightly demented and hilariously written and performed low-budget comedies that deal, mostly, with betrayal between friends, grudges, revenge, selfishness, the fickleness of relationships, interchangeable characters, failure, self-hatred, and characters on downward spirals. All were personal films for Onur Tukel, in which he reveals what he thinks are his worst traits. None made money but they deservedly earned Tukel a following, me included. And so now he’s out on the streets, as Spike Lee was for Do the Right Thing, to alert people that his new film, Catfight, will be opening at those two theaters and eight others around the country, and be available on VOD, this Friday, March 3. For the first time, Tukel has lured name actors to star in his film and I can say that the perfectly cast Sandra Oh and Anne Heche give courageous, nothing-held-back performances. In the near future, as a new war rages in the Middle East, Oh plays Veronica Salt, a slightly alcoholic wife (of a war profiteer who has had enough of her) and mother (of a sweet, artistic teenage boy who loves her) and Heche is Ashley, a struggling, self-important artist who is about to have a baby with her lover, Lisa (Alicia Silverstone). The two angry women come across each other at Veronica’s husband’s party, at which Ashley is helping a caterer friend, and they still hold grudges against each other from something that happened years before when they were college friends. And they fight. If you’ve seen the trailer, you know they really go at:

Not once, but three times in the film. The fights are only some of the film highlights—some may say delights—only some of many WTF moments. On Monday I finally got to sit down with the cool, amiable, and charming Onur Tukel. As we munched on Cuban sandwiches at a restaurant on Bowery, we had this freewheeling conversation.

Onur Tukel. Danny Peary photo.

Danny Peary: What’s your background?

Onur Tukel: I was born and raised in a small town in North Carolina called Taylorsville, which is about an hour from Charlotte. Everybody but my immediate family still lives in Turkey. I was born in 1972, and was the youngest of three children, which I think is why I never want to be told what to do. In 1990, I went to UNC, in Chapel Hill, about two and a half hours from Taylorsville. I was a radio-television major. That’s when I discovered Woody Allen, and the low-budget films of Whit Stillman and Richard Linklater. After graduating, I moved to Wilmington and made some independent films. One was so bad that it crippled my confidence and I lost my nerve to make more films for awhile. I moved to Durham and worked in public television for about seven years. I lost my job and moved to Charlotte and was hired as a graphic designer. I could work from home, so I decided, at 38, to move to New York before it was too late. I had visited New York quite a bit and felt connected to it and always wanted to make movies there. I have always loved the magic, energy, chaos, and the structure of the city. And that it’s a melting pot with people from all over the world with different philosophies on everything. I’ve now been here about six and a half years, of which the first four years felt like I was at the university again. In the seven years I wasn’t making films, I was trying to write and illustrate children’s books. I was sending them off to publishers and getting rejected by everyone. Then the week before I moved to New York, a publisher in Terrytown called to let me know they wanted to publish one of my books. So the first couple of years I was here, I worked on a couple of movies and two children’s books. That was cool.

DP: Are you a full-time director now?

OT: No, no. I did graphic design for one company for several years. I’m still doing graphic design and freelance projects when I can. I love graphic design but it would be nice to do full-time film work and that is all I’m doing for the next few months.

Sandra Oh as Veronica.

DP: I’m surprised you’re not in Catfight because you’ve acted for other directors, including Alex Karpovsky in Red Flag, and starred in your own films, Summer of Blood and Applesauce.

OT: When I was making films in North Carolina it was more about aesthetics than acting. I didn’t understand acting. I learned about acting when I was in Red Flag and Richard’s Wedding. I’d watch my performance and the performances of the other actors and see that I was the weak link. It was heartbreaking and embarrassing but it made me understand what good acting is. I learned so much from Alex Karpovsky and I’m decent in Red Flag. And I’m good in Applesauce because I was doing an extension of my own personality.   I’m aware I’m not an actor, I’m a performer of myself.   If you’re not self-conscious in front of a camera, you can give a good performance. I wouldn’t be able to cry because that’s a skill, but anger is easy for me because I have a lot of anger. I just play what’s natural to me.

DP: You mentioned discovering Woody Allen when you were in college. Your movies are nothing like his—though one can draw some comparisons between your comedy of ill manners, Applesauce, and a couple of his films about troubled marriages–yet people still link you to him. Maybe it’s because of your self-deprecating humor and New York sensibility.

OT: We share the same anxieties, too. Woody Allen is my idol. This is a man who has made a dozen brilliant films. My favorite film of his is Deconstructing Harry. There’s this angry, angry side of him in that movie. He used all these vile, disgusting words and I think his anger was directed at Mia Farrow. There’s also that duality that in my films: I love and hate myself equally. People say I need therapy. It’s true but I’m in denial.

DP: You have made comedy horror films so I’m guessing you are a fan of An American Werewolf in London.

OT: Oh, man, that’s a big influence on me. I was watching it in middle school and I could just picture me and my friends walking on the moors in England. Being young, being silly, and then being ripped apart by the wolf. I like mixing genres and in that film the horror and the comedy mix so beautifully. It’s not necessarily the craft behind a movie that I respond to, it’s the heart behind, the energy, the attitude, and I like a little rock ‘n’ roll, a little grittiness, a little imperfection. John Landis also directed National Lampoon’s Animal House, which I also loved. Most of my influences were the horror films and action films I watched in the 1980s starring Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I lived for their films. In terms of tone, which I’ve never been good with, I think of Rocky III, a great film from the eighties that has, like Catfight, three fights and is at times goofy and silly, sweet and endearing, and full of tragedy and despair. It’s a roller coaster ride of emotions. The tone is all over the place, which is why a lot of people don’t like it, but I like the unpredictability that comes with that.

DP: What’s the genesis of Catfight?

OT: Devoe Yates, who is the musical supervisor on Catfight, and I came up with the idea of making a movie with that title. We were talking about a great eighties movie called Three O’Clock High that ends with a showdown between two teenagers. We thought it would be cool if we did that with women. I am really drawn to two distinct, antipodal personalities going at it. It’s one of the things I love the most. In my own personality I have two conflicting sides. I have a generous, giving side and think about other people. Also I have a selfish asshole side and thinks the world is shit and wants it to explode.

Anne Heche and Alicia Silverstone.

DP: But in Catfight, Veronica and Ashley are both selfish assholes.

OT: Yes. I tried not make either of them the hero. But in the original script, the two women were different from the ones Sandra Oh and Anne Heche would play. The two women pitted against each other were in their twenties, worked at an advertising agency, and were sleeping with the same guy. They w3re in a love triangle. I wrote a couple of drafts of the script and gave it to MPI, a really wonderful media group out of Chicago that specializes in genre and action films. MPI had bought Summer of Blood and read my scripts for Applesauce and Catfight and gave me enough money to make both movies. Applesauce didn’t make any money but they liked it and loved my script for Catfight and wanted to make it. I re-read my script that I’d written a year and a half before and didn’t connect with it at all. I didn’t want to make a movie about women in their twenties anymore. MPI was fine about my doing a rewrite, assuming I’d just tweak the script to make it even better. At the time, I never thought I could get name actors because of the low budget. But then I read that Maggie Gyllenhaal had been passed over for the role of a mistress of a man played by an actor in his fifties because she was 38. Who cares what her age is? She’s beautiful. Any guy with a libido would want to have her as mistress. A light went off in my head. It was a shame that women in their late thirties and forties were being passed over for leads in movies but it presented an opportunity for me, a low-budget director who had never worked with a “star” before. My new goal was to write a good script about two women in their forties and try to find two really good name actresses that age who might be willing to do something on a much smaller scale than they were used to because they liked the script and wanted to do good work.

DP: Catfight is just about two women who are pitted against each other, but you made sure to include political content in your script, which is why it can be called a satire.

OT: To me, Catfight represents the anger and bitterness that I still feel from the war in Iraq. The politics crept in because I’d been thinking about it since the war in Iraq. That was the time I was most angry, when I lost friends and argued with family members. I read a wonderful book a few years ago by Naomi Klein called The Shock Doctrine that talks about disaster capitalism and not trusting capitalism when it’s built around misery. So when I was doing the rewrite I was thinking about disaster capitalism during war. To me, Veronica, the wife of a war profiteer, represents money and consumption and capitalizing on destruction. I’m not anti-capitalism because as a filmmaker I’m trying to make money, but I’m against making money off other people’s misery, like the despicable people who have capitalized off the war in Iraq. There is so much money to be made by the defense industry and huge corporations.

DP: Were you upset specifically about the preemptive strike or the aftermath?

OT: The preemptive strike, the insouciance of the American public, the collective shrug saying “That’s okay.” The “fart machine” in the movie, which appears behind the right-wing television host when he talks about the current war, represents the collective shrug of the masses. I thought people, including smug liberals, were culpable in the acceptance of it all.

DP: Was MPI happy with your new script written for older actresses?

OT: They weren’t happy. For the original script with the young women, they were going to give me way more money than I’d ever had to make a movie.   But this new script was angry, political, and had women in their forties. So they now offered me an insanely low budget. I was so passionate about the script that I said, “That’s great, I’ll take anything.” MPI had treated me well in the past, never interfering with anything I did, so I didn’t look elsewhere. However, my new goal was to get big actors to be in the movie so MPI would give me additional money. MPI gave me a little start-up money and I hired two geniuses, a casting director, Stephanie Holbrook, and a producer, Gigi Graff, and they got the script into the hands of the right agents and just by sheer magic and luck, Sandra Oh and Anne Heche read the script, loved it, and said they wanted to do it.

DP: Did you feel that you had to have two names?

OT: I could have had one. I was lucky to get two. When Anne saw Sandra Oh had already agreed to be in it, she said she was definitely in, too. They both wanted to play Veronica. Sandra got that part because she was cast first. If Anne had agreed to do the movie first, she would have been cast as Veronica and I’m not sure Sandra would have wanted to play Ashley. So it worked out beautifully. Then I met with Alicia Silverstone and of course she wanted to play Veronica, too. But I asked her if she’d play the supporting role of Ashley’s lover, Lisa. She asked me who was playing Ashley. I said Anne Heche and she agreed. But she told me, “It’s a small role and I want more on the page. She’s not there, she’s a flat character.” So I went off to write a stronger part for her. I can’t believe I got these three women.

DP: Did the actresses know you and your films?

OT: No, they never heard of my work. Although they loved the script, they wondered who I was and the tone I wanted Catfight to have. We showed them Applesauce so they could decide if I was a good enough director to work with. My question was, “If the quality of Catfight is the same as Applesauce, are you onboard?” And there was a resounding yes. Fortunately, they loved Applesauce—the energy, the madness, the naturalistic performances. So we were off and running.

DP: You shot your film at a lightening pace, so did you have time to speak to your actresses about their characters?

OT: Sandra and I Skyped when she was in L.A., and we’d go through the script line by line. She was so respectful, treating me as if I were Paul Schrader. If she wanted to change something, I’d say go ahead because even if I didn’t understand what she wanted I trusted that it was important to her. I never have known how to write for women. Sandra and Anne’s styles couldn’t have been more different. Sandra came in with a script where every line had been dissected. Anne is a very instinctual actress so she came in and figured it out.  Anne said that if she and Sandra went on a road trip together, Sandra would have a map with every turn highlighted and Anne would just follow the sun or use a compass—and they’d both reach their destination at the same time. We had no time for rehearsal but we would talk about things if need be. It’s always the case that I want my actors to know their characters better than I do. That is due to both my laziness and that I always want to give my actors freedom to be artists. All I demand from my actors is that when they come to the set they should know their dialogue so we don’t waste any time. It’s very mechanical for me. Both actresses would challenge me. Especially Sandra. She taught me so much as a director. She loved the script, but I don’t know how she saw me as a director. I could sense she was annoyed at times. Sometimes I’d give a direction that wasn’t the best and I could tell they didn’t think it was the best idea. A bad director can get in the way of a good performance. They knew what they were doing. On most scenes we’d do just three or four takes but if the actresses wanted to go again I would. I never said no. I told them that Catfight would depend on the performances, and I was so open the whole time to everything. All my films are collaborative, but this was insanely so. The whole time it was about respecting them. I knew my place. They were excited that I always film with two cameras because it preserves the energy of the actors. When you have one camera and it’s on one of two people in the scene, sometimes only she is giving 100% while the one off camera is waiting for when the camera is on her. Because acting is so draining. I wanted to see them both at the same time, I didn’t want to miss anything Sandra or Anne or Alicia did.

DP: They gave you their A performances.

OT: They pulled the best out of the crew, which was mostly women, and the women in the crew pulled the best out of them. Even though it was a small crew, everybody was so passionate and into it. We wanted to make something really good. A film like this is never made by one person and I’m beholden to how fucking great my crew was.

DP: Some directors keep actors who play antagonists away from each other between takes, but do you care about such things?

OT: Oh, no. Anne and Sandra are social butterflies. They were excited about working with each other and became as thick as thieves. They had such mutual respect, that you can sense as well as see. My sets are very social. I like people to have conversations. If it’s quiet, I can’t focus. I need the chaos. At times my actresses will ask that I tell everyone to be quiet so they can get into their head spaces before shooting. My job as a director is to make my actors as comfortable as possible so they’re not in their heads too much but in the moment. The only time I remember asking for quiet was the scene in the cabin late in the film. That scene is very heavy and we were not social while shooting it. It was very, very quiet and everyone got into a meditative, intense, dramatic mode.

DP: Were both actresses on the set the whole time?

OT: Actually, for just six days, filming three fight scenes and three face-to-face scenes. Anne’s last few days were at this cabin in upstate New York and her last scenes filming were literally the last scenes in the movie. The first scene that Sandra shot is the scene when they meet at the party, when Veronica asks Ashley to serve her a drink and they recognize each other from college. I’d shot all Alicia Silverstone’s scenes first and then we filmed the party scene on the third day. Sandra came in and we shot her close-ups with Anne, six pages of dialogue. No rehearsal, the two actresses had known each other for about fifteen minutes. Pretty intense, right? For that scene I did six takes and took chunks from two or three them.

DP: That’s a pivotal scene in the film because we learn that Veronica and Ashley have been holding a grudge since something happened in college between them. That’s what started their feud.

OT: We talked about the history between Veronica and Ashley, and what the catalyst was that set them off. I felt that I knew what happened but they didn’t want me to tell them and they didn’t want to discuss it. They felt it was better left unknown.

DP: Their response is interesting because I’d have thought they’d ask you if you forgot to include a line in their conversation that explained their split years before. I’m sure it had to do with Ashley being a lesbian and Veronica either pushing her away or making a call that got Ashley into trouble at school

OT: Right. We debated whether to put a line in, but they said no. Even though we don’t know, I think it’s a pretty clear assumption that, as you said, it is tied up to Ashley being a lesbian.

DP: Your movie characters are always stuck in the past.

OT: Interesting. I hadn’t thought about that, but if a character is holding a grudge they obviously are diseased by something they can’t get over from the past. Someone hurt her and she’s still lashing out because she can’t heal.

DP: One of your recurring themes, including in Applesauce, is revenge. Your characters never forget about what happened, no matter how many years have gone by.

OT: Revenge is a dirty, horrible thing but I’m a vengeful type of person.   The way I rationalize it in my head is that it’s about delivering justice. I feel that if someone has wronged me they can wrong other people in the same way, so I have to put them in their place. I tell myself it’s not about trying to make myself feel better or make them feel bad, it’s about teaching them a lesson. It’s very satisfying to see people get what they deserve. But it’s just not the way it is in the real world. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld weren’t punished for the Iraq War. Now that Trump is president, it pisses me off that they are being treated like martyrs and heroes and I feel it’s my job to remind everyone what they did and what we went through because of them.

DP: In addition to revenge in Catfight, there is an escalation of the feud and things get worse and worse, just as in your previous films.

OT: Sure. General mayhem. I’m a mischief maker.

DP: Jennifer Prediger, one of your frequent cast members, told me that she hopes to make a film with you like War of the Roses, the prototype film about an escalation of violence between two everyday people who once got along. That’s man vs. woman. And Jennifer thought of that before you made Catfight.

OT: Really? It would be terrific to make a film like that.

DP: At the beginning of Catfight, Ashley, the antiwar artist, seems to be sympathetic. Meanwhile, Veronica is anti-art, advising her son to give up his drawing and conform. That’s the worst thing to say. We don’t realize Ashley’s an awful person until we see her verbally attack her assistant Sally for no good reason. Are we supposed to like one woman over the other?

OT: I think that by the end you definitely like Veronica more. She has learned so much.

DP: But has she learned the key thing—not losing her temper around Ashley?

OT: She lost her son, then she heals because she gets her son back when she finds videos made by him for her on her phone, and then Ashley causes her to lose him again.

DP: Denial is another constant theme in your movies. Your characters complain and always blame others for what’s wrong.

OT: Absolutely. In this movie, the tragic flaw of Veronica and Ashley is that they blame the other one for what’s wrong in their lives. They’re always pointing their fingers and never taking responsibility for their own actions. SPOILER ALERT: Peace is right in front of them at the end. They break bread. And they lose it because they still blame each other and no one is taking their own responsibility. Veronica should have backed up her video file! Ashley should have apologized instead of implying it was Veronica’s fault for not backing up her file. END SPOILER ALERT Do you think the last sequence was set up a little like a western, with Ashley walking down the trail to the country house where Veronica now lives with her aunt?

DP: If you put her on a horse, I’d have seen it.

OT: That was deliberate. My cinematographer, Zoe White, who designed all the shots, and I had time to really think about shot construction. Even the music has some tribal drumbeat. That’s one of my favorite scenes. It’s a showdown between Ashley and Veronica, and all that’s missing are the holsters and on their sides.

DP: As in other films, seemingly different people can be interchangeable. Here Veronica is hospitalized and loses everything while she’s in a two-year coma, then the same thing happens to Ashley—and they both end up with nothing. Another theme of yours is failure.

OT: That’s a huge theme. I don’t ever want that to go away. So many creative seeds come from failure.

DP: All your characters end up worse than when they started, as in your previous films.

OT: Is that true? Well, it’s the story of my life. At the end of the day, no matter how successful we are, we’re all going to lose—we’re all going to die.   So we’re all losers. Comedy is a way for me to avoid thinking about death.

DP: Veronica and Ashley put each other in position to lose everything by beating each other into comas, but they don’t actually cause the other’s losses themselves. Each loses everything while in their respective comas, two years apart, but it’s not the other woman who causes that.

OT: Yes. It’s all very much about denial, thinking you’re being true in a world that’s very fake.   They ruin their own lives, self-sabotage, but keep blaming each other for that. That’s another big thing for me in my personal life. One thing about their three fights is that each time you think they’re over they keep going. It’s like when Bush stood on the aircraft carrier with the giant Mission Accomplished banner behind him and then the war went haywire. In the first fight, Ashley chokes out Veronica and they’re both on the floor in the stairwell and we assume the fight’s over. If Veronica just says, “You win,” that would have been it. But she backhands Ashley and Ashley goes nuts and beats Veronica to a pulp, resulting in her spending the next two years in the hospital in a coma. In the second fight, if Ashley just stays down, Veronica won’t continue to mercilessly beat her to a pulp and put her in coma.

DP: Did the fights turn out as you expected?

OT: Much better. There were a couple of fights that we used for reference, one between Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours and another between Andrew McCarthy and Rob Lowe in Class. I love a good fist fight. The nobility of the fistfight is romantic to me: two people facing each other without there being collateral damage. I’ve been in a lot of fights. If someone says something that offends me, I can’t keep my mouth shut.  I’m all for words and think we should have the power to express ourselves in any way we want. My mouth has gotten me into so much trouble, and it always has led to someone throwing the first punch at me. I never throw the first punch because that’s wrong and evil and cowardly. But once someone throws the first punch, all rules are off the table. Of course, I don’t want to kill anyone. I wanted Anne and Sandra to fight like men, without the hair pulling and slapping. I wanted long fights and it to be visceral. The impetus for the film was to see two great actresses give an emotional performance and a physical performance. Sandra and Anne delivered. We had two stunt doubles but they did a lot of the fighting themselves. I hoped it would work and it really did. For the final fight outdoors, it was winter but the days were warm, so we lucked out.

DP: I am guessing the stairwell wasn’t in the script, that you were looking for any space you could find for the first fight.

OT: That’s exactly right for all the fights. The first fight is intimate, in a cloistered space. It was supposed to take place in an elevator in a really high building. When Veronica’s husband tells her not to drink at the party, that was supposed to take place in an elevator going up. Then the metaphor was that in the elevator on the way down with Ashley she was going to crash in ways you couldn’t imagine. We just couldn’t find an elevator.

DP: It works in that they are fighting for their lives in the stairwell and behind the door people are partying.

OT: I hadn’t thought of that but it makes sense. The second fight takes place in a tire shop. The hammer and the wrench can represent military weapons, and there is the transportation industry and the oil industry. The third fight in the country represents man vs. nature, earth, birth. The third fight was supposed to be the bloodiest, but I’m glad Sandra and Anne didn’t want to do any more punching, but instead suggested doing heads in the dirt, thrashing around. I said, “Hell, yes!”

SPOILER ALERT:

DP: It was a good idea because we don’t want either character to be killed. They are the only hope for each other. The need each other Ashley isn’t going back to the city.

OT: Then Veronica would take Ashley in, just as Aunt Charlie took in Veronica. They would have to work it out.

DP: Do you think Veronica and Ashley should be good friends?

OT: We shot another ending, in which they might remember they once loved each other. I won’t tell you what it is and I chose not to have it for my ending, but it will included on the DVD.

END SPOILER ALERT

DP: I think viewers will be surprised that the fights are hardcore, without the humor found in say a Jackie Chan movie.

OT: There’s a lot more drama in Catfight than anything I’ve ever done. In reality, I can’t do anything but comedy. I don’t have enough confidence in myself and I haven’t experienced enough pain to make something dramatic. I’m a lucky, entitled person. But I was working toward it Catfight. Because it does deal with war and the loss of children.   It needs some drama for the fights to mean something. Veronica and Ashley have to be in some kind of pain. The drama is to make the pain real. If I haven’t lost the audience after the first fight, or the second fight, then I’ve got them.

DP: Are Veronica and Ashley metaphors for nations that will always be in conflict?

OT: I think so. I also think each of the fights is metaphorical to a degree. Sandra has her own ideas about that. I’m not a big fan of style over a primal feeling, and this movie is all about being primal and reaching inside instead of trying to manipulate external forces. It’s a very internal film.

DP: You made Catfight before Donald Trump was elected but if he hadn’t been running for president last year would your film be different? Was he on your mind while making Catfight?

OT: The Iraq War was on my mind the whole time. We shot everything before Trump was elected. The only change we made from the script to the film was adding the scene in which Aunt Charlie says two of her trees are named Hillary and Donald. We had some extra time after filming at the cabin and I wanted to add something with Amy Hill because I like her so much. So I added in that bit of her naming her trees. Catfight is a metaphor for the new war in Iraq. I just didn’t see a woman president as the person who would start a war.

DP: But doesn’t the film disprove that? We always think that if a woman were in office then she’d be sensible and calm and not macho so she wouldn’t go to war with anybody. But you see these two women, Veronica and Ashley, who can’t control their aggressive, violent impulses.

OT: Catfight is about female aggression but through my lens of the standard political foundations of patriarchy. A mellow president and a mellow administration start a war against a small, defenseless country and we never see it. All I was thinking about was America starting a new war and what kind of government had to be in place for that to happen. I thought Hillary would win but didn’t want to have a female president in my film who would start a war. It had to be a Republican male president.   Do I think we’ll have a future war under Trump? Yes.

DP: I watched you online being interviewed with Anne Heche, Sandra Oh, and Alicia Silverstone and I was wondering what you were thinking as they were saying it is a feminist film but couldn’t really articulate why.

OT: I have the same problem explaining it. We’re talking about empathy here, feeling for the other person, and I think women, because they carry a baby for nine months, have a sacred connection to their children. I lost my dad and it was sad, but the thought of losing my mom cripples me. That would change me as a person. Any time I hear about young people dying, I think of the mother. The loss of children is why I thought I should use women, it had to be a profound loss and I can’t think of any loss more profound than a woman losing her child. While in comas, Veronica loses her son in battle, Ashley loses the chance to share a baby with Lisa.

DP: Almost all screen time is given to Sandra or Anne, or both, but you include a baby shower scene with just Alicia and actresses playing her friends. Her Lisa is a bit odd in that scene, complaining about each of the presents being dangerous to the baby.

OT: When Alicia asked me to expand her role, I read a few books on how to be a really responsible mother and I pitched the idea to her of having a self-reflective baby shower where we’d poke fun at Lisa’s helicopter parenting and how protective of a mother she is. And she got it and was excited to do that scene but said, “Onur, I don’t want her to come off as crazy.” But she does anyway. How could she not when she’s being so impossible?

DP: But if you read about her, you see Lisa is not that far from who Alicia Silverstone is.

OT: She is that fanatical about the environment. The truth of it is what makes it really funny. People really respond to it, and it’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie.

DP: Do you think Catfight will get you into the mainstream a little more and people in Hollywood will know who you are?

OT: I don’t care about Hollywood. It’s conservative and smug and they don’t give a shit about enlightening the culture. It’s about keeping people dumb and consuming. From the mass media news networks to Hollywood films, it’s about distraction and consumption and mind-numbing nothingness. I despise Hollywood. That’s probably self-sabotage. It would be great if someone came to me and asked me to make a film for $30 million. But that’s not realistic. And I wouldn’t trust anyone who comes to me. There are a lot of festivals that don’t want my films, a lot of people don’t like me. Hollywood doesn’t know anything about me and few managers and agents have come knocking on my door. Once they’ve had a conversation with me, they run the other way. I have always been a provocateur. It’s not that I want the attention, but what’s the point? And since I’m a low-budget filmmaker, the only chance my movies will be seen and have some impact culturally is if I to shake the nest a little bit. So if someone says not to do something, I always want to do it even more.   I’ve always liked the misunderstood villain in movies, I like the bad guys. And I consider myself an outlaw. People say, “You’ll never be successful being that way.” For twenty years I’ve been making films and I’ve never made a dime off anything, but that has never stopped me and I feel lucky that I can make films and I’ll never stop whether I have success or not. However, I’m beginning to value myself as an artist and at least demand that I get paid. I do hope my films make money. I do hope people come out to see Catfight. Hurting investors who trusted me makes me feel bad. I was recently on a podcast and it didn’t go so well, so I hope I didn’t hurt the film, but we’ll see. I’m not good at the press thing because I’m a loose cannon and probably mentally unstable at times. So it makes me feel good that my actresses think enough about the film to be doing press for it.

DP: You’re a prolific writer, so I wonder how many unproduced scripts you have on your shelf. OT: I’ve been writing scripts since I was twenty-four, so I probably have about twenty-five.

I tend to write my first drafts pretty quickly, and I’m very focused for two or three months while I try to get the rewrites going, and then will do them in three or four days. I spend two or three months total time spread out about seven months writing a script. Then I will read it when I have some distance from it and may completely have forgotten I wrote it. In the last few years I’ve written four scripts that I want to make. They have different budgets. There are the $35,000 films, which, if I can never raise another dollar, I can find three or four friends with disposable income to contribute between $5,000 and $10,000. And there are movies that will cost three or four million dollars, my Holy Grail projects that I assume will never get funded. And there are middle projects what will cost $300,000 to $500,000.

DP: Are you already working on anything else?

OT: I’ve done one thing I can’t speak of yet. And in about a month and a half I’m going to do a one-location movie about two Trump supporters in a hotel room on the night of the election. It’s my favorite thing that I’ve ever written. I want to do movies that are completely outside of who I am as an insecure forty-four-year-old artist. The realistic plan will always be to get the best actors to work with. But there are no other plans other than to create new things. The most beautiful thing about humanity is a bunch of people coming together to tell a story. Film as an art form embraces that.

DP: How can people see Catfight?

OT: It will open on March 3 in about ten theaters, including Cinema Village in New York and the Spectacle Theater, a tiny theater at 124 S. 3rd Street in Williamsburg, and on VOD. And people can go to Itsacatfight.com and see the theaters where it will be playing.

How Lloyd Kramer Spent His “Midsummer in Newtown”

Playing in Theaters

How Lloyd Kramer Spent His “Midsummer in Newtown”

(from Sag Harbor Express Online 1/28/17)

By Danny Peary

Midsummer in Newtown fits my category Movies That Should Play in Sag Harbor. Of course, due to the mysterious fire that wiped out several businesses, there no longer is a movie theater in Sag Harbor*, so consider seeing Lloyd Kramer’s stirring documentary when it opens Friday at the Village East Cinema at 12th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan. It opens next week in Los Angeles. If you live elsewhere, keep an eye out for when it plays in your town because you will be touched deeply by this tender film in which joy bests heartbreak.  From the synopsis in the press notes: When Newton, Connecticut was devastated by the loss of 20 first graders and six adults at the hands of a shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the world looked on in horror unable to fathom such a tragedy. In [this] emotionally powerful and uplifting documentary, filmmaker Lloyd Kramer gains intimate access to three families who find hope in the transformative power of the arts. Anchoring the film is the story of two Sandy Hook Elementary School students, Tain and Sammy, who join an exuberant cast of Newtown children—bringing healing to their young lives and to their community by staging “A ROCKIN’ Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a freewheeling musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s beloved comedy.

I saw Kramer’s inspiring doc at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, and couldn’t set up an interview with him at the time. Finally, in anticipation of its theatrical release, I recently spoke to the three-time DGA nominee over coffee and omelets at the Washington Square Diner in the West Village.

Danny Peary: According to the press notes, before Midsummer in Newtown was greenlit by Participant Media and Vulcan Production, and even before there was partial financing, Tom Yellin (Cartel), one of your two producers, sent you to Newtown because the kids were about to audition for “A ROCKIN’ Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Lloyd Kramer: Tom knew about the musical because of his friendship in New York City with its director, Michael Unger. We had no funding and that usually takes about a year, but rehearsals were beginning in about three weeks. So I went up there with someone who had a small camera with the intention of filming the auditions. This was at the end of May in 2014, seventeen or eighteen months after the tragedy there.

DP: Were you searching for a project at the time?

LK: In the world of documentary filmmaking, you’re always juggling a few things. I was developing something else but this came along and I was open to it. I thought it was a great story that kids in Newtown were putting on a show after what they’d been through, and the purpose Michael Unger had for directing it. I was told me that putting on a show could have a positive effect on kids in this town, but I wouldn’t be sure unless I was there seeing it happen.

Sammy (right) on opening night.

DP: How did you two feel driving into Newtown for the first time?

LK: We got sort of a chill when we passed the sign that said “Entering Newtown.” The auditions were done at the high school, but we happened to drive by Sandy Hook Elementary School. It’s by the firehouse where many of the kids fled that day and the driveway was blocked off. It was amazing how we could feel the aftermath.

DP: Perhaps your first reaction when seeing Newtown for the first time is reflected in the opening of your movie when we see the pretty blue sky and white clouds above Newtown. An outsider might imagine there always being gloomy dark skies above Newtown since the tragedy.

LK: Yeah. It’s like, what could go wrong? It’s a beautiful day yet what happened will always be in the ether.

DP: Did you feel like an intruder when you first arrived?

LK: Yes. To some extent I never got over that. I was always very conscious of what happened to the people in Newtown and always very respectful.

DP: How many kids were at the auditions?

LK: About 200. I wasn’t sure what we had here, just that I was taken with these great, precocious kids who really seemed to believe in what they were doing.

Tain Gregory and his family at the premiere of the film at the Tribeca Film Festival.

DP: Did you meet your two child protagonists, Tain Gregory and Sammy Vertucci, before you met their parents?

LK: All the young kids who auditioned had their mothers there. When I met Tain’s mother, Sophfronia, I said, “Wow, this is a great family.” Eventually, I met his father, too. I would also meet Sammy’s parents, Diane and Tom. Sammy was at the original audition but I don’t think we actually filmed her then because we were out in the hallway with our one camera talking to Tain. To be honest, of all the kids the first one I gravitated to was Tain, who was just nine years old and in third grade. I watched him recite “Jabberwocky” for his audition and then I talked to him afterwards and he was just a charmer. I’m sure he would have been cast anyway, but I kept lobbying for him, telling Michael, “Come on, this kid is great!”

DP: How long were you up there filming the auditions?

LK: We spent two days there. Tom said, “Let’s keep going,” so again on spec, I returned to Newtown the next weekend for the callbacks, and that’s when Tain and Sammy were cast. Then we did some scrambling to get some quick partial funding so we could film the rehearsals.

DP: Seeing how happy and excited and engaged Tain, Sammy and the other kids are at rehearsals—and how the troubled Sammy comes out of her shell—made me wish that every kid in Newtown could be in this show. I felt sorry for those who didn’t make the cut. Did you?

Jimmy and Nelba holding a poster of their daughter, Ana.

LK: Yes. But there were actually two productions that Michael Unger directed: “A ROCKIN’ Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “101 Dalmatians.” So there were a lot of kids involved and only a few were excluded. Some, of course, didn’t get speaking parts.

DP: Why did you choose to a rock musical adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” rather than “101 Dalmatians?”

LK: For a couple of reasons. We thought kids doing Shakespeare was an interesting challenge. Also there is something in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” at least on the surface, that is about restoration—it’s summer, not winter–even though, we make the point that Newtown can never really have full restoration. As Newtown’s historian says, it’s going to age out; there’s nothing that is going away.

DP: Did you stay in Newtown throughout filming?

LK: No, we went back and forth between there and New York City.  We’d go for two or three days to Newtown and then spend a few days here before returning. We didn’t see every day of rehearsals, but we saw about half of them.

DP: What was your interaction with Michael Unger? You had separate projects and goals so surely you didn’t want to be in each other’s way.

LK: There was no problem at all. When I heard about this story I hadn’t met Michael, so I kept thinking about Waiting for Guffman and its director who just wanted a gig. But Michael is the real deal. He’d never say to us, “Stay away while I’m doing this.” He might tell us to move the camera so we wouldn’t interfere with the choreography but it would never be for reasons of privacy. I never tried to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes, including Michael’s, and I made sure he was okay with whatever we were doing. After I did an interview with a kid, he’d ask about it but never interfered. He didn’t necessarily know when we were asking the kids about The Day, as it is called.

DP: I read that your other producer, Braden Bergan, spent time in a town not far from Newtown. Were you advised by her or anyone else on what to expect and how to conduct yourself when approaching the kids?

LK: Ultimately, the parents guided us. Even as we were shooting the callbacks and rehearsals, we were meeting with them. We’d ask them what was permissible and good to ask their kids, not just on camera but during the course of a day. And I never interviewed a child without their parents being there.

DP: It is interesting hearing Tain recall being protective of his special-needs best friend Will during the attack on the school. In your experience with the kids, did you ever hear them talk to each other about that day?

LK: No, but they would talk to me about it. They’d think I wanted to know about a friend of theirs and they might tell me a story. We didn’t have permission to include those moments in the movie. Even for the people who are talked about, we also made sure we had permission to use the footage. Very often when we talked about The Day with a kid it would be near the end of the interview. I waited for the kids to reference something about it and that would lead to a discussion about it. How much we’d deal with The Day was a constant source of discussion in production and post-production. What is the correct balance? I had two hundred hours of interviews and we could have reconstructed every moment of The Day. We wanted to have the story of The Day in our film but we didn’t want to have too much and submerge the story we were most interested in. Michael was concerned too because he wanted to focus on the play, not The Day.

DP: You say in the press notes, “Without minimizing Michael Unger’s accomplishments, our job wasn’t to show a performance of the play. The play simply provides up with a context in which to tell the story of how Newtown is finding a future with positivity and strength after enduring such a terrible tragedy.”

LK: That helps explain how we present the play on opening night. We include moments from a number of scenes, but we don’t show it scene by scene. So if you want to know every plot twist and turn of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” you’re not going to get it from watching this movie. Believe me, early on we considered whether to show the whole production. But we realized that wasn’t what our story was. We wanted to show enough of what’s going on in the play that’s relative to the theme of what’s going on with these kids and this town and show how the arts can inspire people and bring them together for a common purpose. We also wanted to show how the arts can say something about the human condition. We wanted to get at the humanity and watch people do it together, through a collaboration. When I was first there, I was thinking that doing something like this musical was the perfect antidote to the worst that can happen, the worst of humanity. The worst of humanity is killing. The antidote is to be in this loving group and doing something positive that you can share with your community. The kids were being imbued with that.

DP: How was it interviewing their parents?

LK: I felt something when I was around the parents in Newtown, as I did with the kids. I was very careful around them. They’d had it with media, so especially at the beginning I was careful not to impose on them my curiosity about how the town was dealing with the tragedy. For good reason they were suspicious of me. To them, media is everybody who comes there with an interest in what happened on December 12, 2012—writers, people with cameras. The families there were lied to and intruded upon in ugly ways. I knew that in some quarters we were perceived negatively.

DP: Do you think the people in Newtown who went through that sad day at Sandy Hook feel they can never explain what they experienced to anyone but each other?

LK: Right, they can never tell an outsider. That was told to me by a lot of people. Especially by Jimmy Greene, who lost his six-year-old daughter Ana that day. He was very conscious of it. We heard so many stories about awkwardness, about people on the outside who mean well but say cringe-worthy things. Jimmy said, and it was seconded by other people, that this was a case where as an outsider you just show up. You don’t have to say anything, your presence is appreciated and is all that is wanted. You may ask someone a question on a subject they don’t want to talk about at that moment. I was not going to be a phony about it, I was there to do a job, but a lot of times I didn’t say much but listened. One of the things I learned is that everybody in Newtown has his or her own story and some didn’t want to tell me what they experienced because they felt they’d be upstaging other families and there would be too much self-interest. A lot of people up there have their own causes. Some like Jimmy’s wife Nelba are fighting for gun legislation, others work closely with various charities, and I learned that the parents of one girl who was killed that day have set up a foundation for brain research into the possible underpinnings of violence.

DP: When people opened up to you, I’m sure you felt fortunate, but did you also feel guilty?

LK: I guess it goes with the territory because you might feel you reeled them in. There was a famous debate in The New Yorker about what a good journalist is, and one of the writers making a case was Janet Malcolm, whose point was that nobody’s hands are clean. Since the days I was a reporter I’ve always been conscious of that.

DP: Before difficult interviews, did you have to give yourself pep talks?

LK: I always asked the parents if there were subject I should avoid. Braden was equally attentive, even more so, to the parents, making sure there were no red flags or if it was a bad time to speak to them. We were supersensitive to all that. It wasn’t hard asking about the play. But the question that lingered both with our interviews and subject matter was: “How do we talk about that day?”

DP: In the press notes, Braden Bergen says, “One of the things we talked about a lot was how to make sure the audience remembers what happened, without dwelling on it.” I’m sure your issue was how to find the right balance in your film.

LK: That’s true. And it goes back to what you were saying about feeling guilty asking tough questions that you needed to ask. We did have to ask about that terrible day because that’s what anchors our interest in the kids. We wanted to acknowledge that they endured this horror and that something is happening now—being in the play–that is helping them find a future with positivity and strength. Jimmy Greene says, “You can’t always choose what happens to you in this life, but you can choose how you respond.” You can respond in an angry way or a loving way. Sometimes it’s by having an event, sometimes it’s doing a play.
DP: It’s expressed in the movie that damaged people can at least try to find love and beauty after horror. In fact, that is the major theme of your movie.

LK: That is the theme. That’s why we wanted to have a gentle quality and mood. Jimmy says that the question he keeps in front of him is: how can he as a musician reflect love and beauty in the spirit of his little girl?  For me, all roads in this doc lead to this moment. We’re all human beings and few of us don’t go through horrible situations at some time, but how we choose to react to it, how we deal with it, is what unites us.

DP: Jimmy uses the word “cope.” When you first started the movie did you, Tom, and Braden already have this find-love-and-beauty-in-tragedy theme in mind?

LK: No. It was originally just about the kids in Newtown being in a play. It came about simply because of what we paid attention to and how we framed things. We wanted to make sure there was a tenderness that came through, because that’s what we felt and what seemed appropriate. We didn’t really force a theme. We didn’t know what the theme was. It just seemed to be a good project, kids putting on a play. I wanted to let the chips fall where they may and let it speak to us. But what happened was that every day we were there the parents of the kids in the play would ask, “Have you talked to the families yet?” By “families” they meant the families who lost a child. At the time we’d talked to just one such family and they weren’t interested in participating.

DP: Once people began telling you to meet these families, did you start thinking that you did indeed need to include the parents of at least one child who didn’t survive?

LK: It occurred to me but I definitely didn’t want to force it. We thought we were going to keep this narrowly focused, but people there kept asking if we had talked to the families, so we met with a couple of them outside of production. They all had something to do with the arts. We were focusing on the kids in the play so I didn’t want it to seem like we were including the token family of a dead child.

DP: I read that it took a while before Jimmy and Nelba spoke to you.

LK: Braden had spent a lot of time with them when she was up there, and it took a while before they agreed to tell their story, both because of their lack of trust in outsiders and that they were hurting so badly. But it went quickly with me. They piggybacked on top of the other stuff we filmed, and the only reason we didn’t speak to them sooner is that we wanted to first finish up at the high school. We talked to Jimmy, who is a Grammy-nominated saxophone player, about his music and the arts, and to Nelba, who is a marriage and family therapist, about what she is doing in regard to a scholarship in Ana’s memory. And it was obvious we should include them in the movie.

DP: Nelba was the perfect subject for you because she is involved in so many things.

LK: She’s great. Her anger is so real. We went to their house a few times and Braden hung out with them a lot.

DP: Did you go into Ana’s room?

LK: It was interesting. We always stayed in the living room, but I asked them if we could go in her room. Finally they agreed, but the stipulation was that we couldn’t film in the house. I was curious about the reason and Nelba said, “Because I know how you are going to shoot her empty chair.” I don’t think I would have done that, but what really moved me was that every day at 4 o’clock she would look out the window because that’s the time her daughter came home from school.

DP: As an outsider, would you refrain from saying the words “I’m sorry for your loss” to them and other parents?

LK: That’s what you say when you first meet. You say it and there’s a voice in you telling you that you might be saying it just because you want something. But we really were sorry and Jimmy was sensitive enough to see that.

DP: What is it that people say that upsets the parents of the victims?

LK: All kinds of things. We’re all human so we say awkward things. The egregious one is: “So are you going to have more children?” They mean well. But even if you say words of consolation, it might not be what they want to deal with at that moment. It makes you feel better, but not them.

DP: Nelba is in the only person in your movie who brings up Adam Lanza. He’s probably a taboo subject for many people in the community, so did you ask her about him or prod her to mention him in connection to the work she is now doing with kids in schools?

LK: Never. Early on Braden and I decided, “One thing we are not going to be talking to anyone about is Adam Lanza.” Although we had first-person accounts, we deliberately just scratched the surface about the most horrifying aspects of what happened and we chose not to deal with the boy who killed those kids. Nelba brought him up on her own and she had the wherewithal to think: How do we prevent the next Adam Lanza? Maybe somebody didn’t reach him at some point? Maybe there was no connection? She has the impulse to think outside herself and ask how she can help it from happening again.

DP: Nelba visits school classrooms and brings up how some kids feel disconnected, as did Adam Lanza. That’s a theme of your movie because Sammy felt that way before being in the play and Tain keeps a strong connection with Will, who might otherwise have trouble finding friends.

LK: Isn’t it great how Tain and Will are with each other? I get almost teary now when I think of them having a play date. To Tain, it was just another day with his friend. He was just eight-years-old but, as you mentioned, on the day the kids were endangered he still thought to put his arms around Will to assure him it would be okay.

DP: In your movie, you show how being in the musical brings at least temporary escape and good cheer to these kids and their parents.  As a viewer, I was thinking how you strategically placed the scenes of the auditions, rehearsals, and the opening night performance so that we too get a cheery break from the serious parts of your movie, when the adults speak of sad, troublesome things.  Was this indeed deliberate on your part to make it easier on us?

LK: The answer is yes to a large extent because, number one…it’s the way life is.  Also, if things are presented in a film or book as relentlessly sad, you run the risk of eliciting pity, as opposed to empathy.  You can make something maudlin by milking sadness.  It’s manipulative and produces sentimentality rather than authentic, earned emotion.  The impulse to be positive and even cheerful, in the wake of trauma or tragedy, is such an exemplary quality.  I’m always moved by that.  It’s a quality we found with the kids, their parents, and, of course, Nelba and Jimmy.

DP: Were the kids, Sammy in particular, self-aware enough to know that being in this play may help them come out of their shells or deal with the tragedy?

LK: I think it began for them as just doing something that was fun. Things around the children were so heavy that adults were trying to find ways to guide them through. This was a case where they were identifying with kids and trying to make Newtown a community that wasn’t defined just by tragedy but was a place where there could be fun. Among the kids I found a real heightened self-awareness, but it probably was after the fact when they realized what the play did for them. Even Tain at the beginning was sort of excited about doing something but he was nervous and not 100% sure why he wanted to be in the play. He’s self-aware but I’m not sure he recognized he was healing by being in it.

DP: I doubt Sammy told you directly that she needed to be healed, but do you think she knew?

LK: Definitely. She used to be outgoing with her friends, played softball and was much more active. But she really closed down and her parents, Diane and Tom, were very concerned.

DP: Sammy didn’t get a speaking part, but obviously it was important for her just to be part of the production. She was cast as one of the fairy queen’s attendants but we can see that she thrived in that supporting role. It was meaningful to her and she made the best of it.

LK: We were up there every week and we could really see her bloom. Although she had an outward demeanor of someone trying to be confident and extroverted, she was really closed off and somewhat insecure. It affected her that her best friend lost her younger sister that day, and then her friend’s family moved away. She was lonely. Sammy by nature is gregarious, but she was prevented from being that way until she tried out for the play. She liked the idea of being in the play and making new friends. She came out of her shell without having to think too hard about it, and it gave me a lot of pleasure watching her make friends, who she has kept to this day.

DP: I think that image I mentioned of a sunny, pleasant sky conveys a spiritual aspect, that God hasn’t abandoned this town. And God is really important to the parents of Ana and Tain.

LK: I’m glad you recognized that. They are great embodiments of what faith can bring. How else can they get through their lives?

DP: Even we nonbelievers would say, “Thank God, they have God.”

LK: Exactly. I am always moved when I find people strengthened by their faith.” I often say to my wife, “I wish I had their faith.” Jimmy says, “We live by the Word. We didn’t expect this but maybe there will be an answer for me that I’ll get because I know Ana is in heaven waiting for us.” Tain’s mother lives by the Word, too, and Tain loves going with her to church.

DP: I found it interesting that when Michael and his composer talk about working with kids, they say kids can meet the same challenges adult actors can. So they don’t treat them as kids but as actors. You want these Newtown kids in particular to experience being kids, so by treating them the same as adult actors, isn’t it defeating the purpose?

LK: The composer works with a lot of kids and says that if you set the bar high for them, they feel really great when they reach it. I think it’s a nice gift how Michael talks about Shakespeare to the kids and makes it understandable for them. And he tells them what he’d tell an adult actor: “Be yourself. I cast you because you’re you.”

DP: After you’d been in Newtown for a while, would people wave to you?

LK: They didn’t know who we were. But there were a few times when we were filming exteriors in the town, we’d get a few looks. Remember this is a community that has even had to deal with “The Truthers,” a small number of people who insist the whole Newtown tragedy never happened. That was going on already when we were making the movie and was brought up by the parents. It affects people in Newtown far greater than the small number of conspiracy theorists, but we didn’t touch on it. There is good reason to address what’s going on but we decided not to give exposure to the extremists.

DP: Other than the two plays were there other things going on in Newtown that were designed to uplift the town and show it was coming back.

LK: The other events I noticed were connected to the church that Sophfronia and Tain go to. The annual parade that we show is important to the town. They say everyone in town is either in it or watching it. It’s tradition, so we could see that the people were defiantly showing up to maintain the link to times prior to the tragedy.

DP: Tell me about Opening Night.

LK: We had a number of cameras so I was making sure that they were placed correctly operating correctly. So that was a lot on my mind. I chose to be right in the wings and to see all that emotion and apprehension and then to walk out onto the stage and hear a huge wave applause was really moving. I also watched the end when they got an ovation and bowed.

DP: Did you feel the tension among the parents?

LK: Sophfronia says that she was nervous. She was. But I knew that even if Tain or Sammy tripped up, they’d get through it. I wasn’t worried but was nervous simply about their walking out on stage for the first time in their lives and seeing a sea of people.

DP: Editing your film must have been emotional for you.

LK: I could say that in some ways it was an easy to choose footage because we’d made the choice that the movie was about the kids and Jimmy and Nelba, and not about the events of The Day. That’s what we were conscious of in editing. The hardest thing about the editing is that we interviewed about sixty people but there turned out to be only five or six central characters. We could have gone off and had numerous storylines but we ended up with the storylines we had in the first cut. In the editing, we kept distilling it.

DP: When you did get teary-eyed in the editing room, was it from seeing sadness or seeing people move out their sadness and find at least temporary happiness?

LK: During the filming, I’d see footage each day. One scene that got to me is of Tain giving Will a tour backstage after the play, before joining everyone else in the hall. Even now I get emotional thinking about that. What a heart he has. It makes me feel good how Tain’s parents have raised him. They are wonderful people. They volunteer for things. Sophfronia, who graduated from Harvard, is a volunteer bus driver.

DP: In your film, Newtown comes across as racially diverse. The cast includes black kids, Tain’s mother Sophfronia Scott Gregory and Jimmy Greene are African American, and Nelba Márquez-Greene’s family emigrated from Puerto Rican. But this town of 27,000, is actually 95% white. Was it deliberate to make it make it seem otherwise?

LK: When I met Tain he came across to me like a Great American Kid. I liked the fact that he was biracial because that’s America. I wanted to make people feel included. I didn’t want it to be an issue. Nelba talks about how in Newtown kids who have been through trauma get help and attention, and it’s not like that everywhere.

DP: It’s two years later. What are your thoughts now?

LK: Here’s the thing: for the last seven months the movie has been on the festival circuit. So I’ve had a chance to go to other cities. I always question everything, so it was very heartening watching it with audiences. We got the same reaction in every city. After Tribeca we went to the Seattle Film Festival. They laughed in the same places, including the brief scene with the young twin girls who speak about Shakespeare, taking turns saying their sentences. I love digression yet we made sure we kept the balance.

DP: I think what audiences will appreciate is that they aren’t going to Newtown so you’re showing them what they want to see. And they come out of the theater feeling good.

LK: Again I go back to what Jimmy says about responding to something bad. The strength and wisdom of that. When you see Tain is going to be okay, you feel good. I knew a lot was going on with Tain when he cried after realizing he won’t be going to more rehearsals and the play is over. There is a lot of depth there.

DP: Are you keeping in touch with the kids?

LK: Yes, I’ve brought Tain and Sammy to a couple of the festivals. Tain did a Q&A in Boston and was so charming. And Sammy did one and was hilarious. In two years their voices have changed and their perspectives. They’re even more self-aware. Oh, and Sammy has become a baker.

DP: The movie is uplifting and reassuring but because of circumstances, you are prevented as a filmmaker from giving viewers a truly happy ending.

LK: True. The last image you see before you see the town again is of Nelba. Jimmy says his last line and the camera drifts to Nelba who is sitting next to him. Her face reveals everything viewers should know. It says that you’re looking at someone who is dealing with the tragedy that took her daughter’s life but who will always have a broken heart. I know she will.

*Yes, like many of you, I am still in shock and despair about losing our cherished Sag Harbor Cinema, the rare one-screen Art Deco movie palace that, along with the Bay Street Theater, made our small village the cultural center of the Hamptons, envied by the elite as the absolute king of the mountain. East Hampton and Southampton didn’t have what we had–now we don’t have it either. In truth, my wife and I might not have bought a house in Sag Harbor in the mid-1990s if not for my being seduced by the sight of a fabulous old-time theater standing proudly right in the middle of Main Street. Moreover, it was an arthouse that dared show independent and foreign films. Some people said Sag Harbor was a town with the great movie theater; I saw it as a movie theater with a town attached to it. I could see myself at home here.

Are you, like me, already missing its quirky aspects? There was the confusion inside the lobby, with nobody knowing which of the two lines were for people who had purchased tickets already or for those without tickets who wondered if the ticket booth would ever reopen. The ticket booth always opened too late, so people often found seats with the movie already playing. They barely had time to buy a bag of cold popcorn. I always wondered why there was a poster across from the ticket booth of an Irish boxing movie nobody ever saw or even heard of? Did it actually play there? And who installed the two urinals in the men’s room so close together that you and the other guy felt you were sharing? I think the Sag Harbor Cinema was the only theater where your view was blocked not only if someone sat directly in front of you but even two or even three rows in front of you. I never saw so much shifting of seats as each person sat down—it was like a pinball machine. I remember the time my elderly mother sat in an aisle seat and a gigantic man sat down in front of her, blocking her view. But she hopped up and cleverly moved to the aisle seat in front of him—only to have an even bigger giant plop down in front of her. And then there was the time a middle-aged man moving side to side down a row—not the aisle—banged into a seat that was down and, like a Buster Keaton, did a slapstick somersault and actually disappeared from view, ending up flat on his tummy on the sticky floor. I, sigh, miss such moments (though not the increase in admission price to $15 for everyone, Mr. Mallow). Most of all of course, I long for the wonderful theater itself and the exceptional, diverse selection of movies that played there and often nowhere else on Long Island, sometimes for two days and sometimes for months at a time. I’m sure you do, too. Surely, the empty space on our street reflects the empty feeling we all have now that something precious is missing. The glorious sign was rescued so I believe that is, forgive the pun, a hopeful sign. Our town needs to attach itself to our cinema again. So, all together now: Please rebuild!