Interview: Jeff Winner on Making Satellite

If you wish to revolutionize your life, hop on the back of a motorcycle and hit the road. That’s the philosophy of the two young lovers in Jeff Winner’s independent film, Satellite. Kevin and Ro (played by Karl Geary and Stephanie Szostak) meet cute, seeing in each other a sexy intelligence that sparks in them a desire to be spontaneous—to do all the things they were always afraid of doing. It’s a fantasy no doubt many in the film’s target audience wish they could realize in their own lives. Opening in New York City on August 9, Satellite is a fable grounded in the everyday. Shot in the streets of New York, probably without permits in true outlaw fashion, and in the cramped apartments and crowded nightclubs, Jeff Winner throws his audience right into the free-falling world of Kevin and Ro. The frequently handheld camerawork moves along at the energetic pace of the lovers, and dreamily lounges with them in their more intimate moments together. It’s about the energy and vibrancy of love, and the willingness to take a dare. But Winner isn’t creating a simplistic fairy tale, because he understands that true love also means genuine pain, and harsh arguments, and surviving confrontations. When Kevin and Ro promise early on never to lie to one another, they don’t realize the power of that bond. Once they realize the truth isn’t always pretty, and that it sometimes hurts, it tests their entire universe. But like the best movies of the French New Wave, Satellite deals with heavy issues without ever feeling like a textbook. It’s the perfect date movie for brainy romantics, closet idealists, and cynics with hearts of gold.

How did you conceive of Satellite? Did any personal need inspire this film?

It always tends to be the thoughts and ideas I’m haunted by in my own life. Inevitably, I have something I’m dealing with I’m not even sure I’m aware of it until I get to a particular part in a script and I can’t move forward because I don’t know the answer. I don’t know how to solve what is keeping my character down because I don’t know how to solve it for myself. Somehow in dealing with my issues within a character, they’re easier for me to address. Eventually after much soul mining, the most authentic answer arises. With Satellite in particular, I knew what they were rejecting and I knew why, but I didn’t know specifically what they hoped to gain.

What sort of tone were you going for?

I call it a fable and a morality tale where the events could, but wouldn’t necessarily need to be received at face value. Although I was really connected to this fairy-tale idea, I didn’t want to limit the potential for a raw, emotional journey from very real and believable characters.

I thought of the French New Wave a little while watching your movie—movies like Breathless which have a playfulness and sense of momentum to them. Would you say it is a fair comparison?

During the script process, my head isn’t occupied with ideas like that. However, when the script was completed and people began to make their associations, Breathless and the French New Wave came up a great deal. Jason Orans, one of the producers, really latched onto this idea. It definitely made sense for our production considering our limited means and our youthful characters’ focus on the existential. It just became something that we embraced within the style of our shoot, and the filmmaking. It didn’t hurt that we cast a Frenchie as a lead.

Did you consider that doing a road movie on a low budget or no budget scenario might be a daunting task?

The thrill of making this script a reality outweighed any other emotion. What I took from making [my previous feature] You Are Here* is, you do your prep and you surround yourself with people who believe in you and in the movie you want to make. In terms of prep, I’ve learned so much about filmmaking through editing. I had a good idea of what would work and how I was going to put it together. We had to move quickly and didn’t waste time on unnecessary coverage. More importantly, I was incredibly fortunate to be working with this team, [executive producer] Larry Fessenden [and producers] Brian Devine, Jason Orans and Jen Small, but especially [director of photography] Bino Marsetti. Bino has this inextinguishable spirit. Everyday he stepped up and made sure we got that day’s coverage. The entire shoot, I never heard him once complain.

Your lead actors, Karl Geary and Stephanie Szostak, are very well cast as Kevin and Ro. How did you choose them?

It was Karl’s performance in Michael Almereyda’s Happy Here and Now where he plays two characters, a cocksure cowboy and a sensitive, insecure firefighter that first made me see him as Kevin. We didn’t see anyone else for the role. For the female lead, Stephanie stole the audition. Nobody came close. She nailed Ro. She was our second audition and we just knew. We did our due diligence, we saw a lot of ladies for the role, but after every audition, Jen Small and I would turn to each other and say, she doesn’t compare. Whatever that actress did, it just didn’t compare to Stephanie’s Ro.

There’s a strong attraction between these characters. Could you describe what happens between them?

I see them as two people who meet and instantly fall for each other. They share a dissatisfaction with the ways their lives are turning out. Through the confidence that comes from being loved and in love—and to avoid past mistakes—they challenge each other with two deals. One, to never lie to each other and two, to dare the other to do the things they’re most afraid of—all for the purpose of living a life more authentic. Before you know it, they’ve quit their jobs, sold their possessions and…well, I won’t say more here.

Have men and women responded differently to the film?

What I am most struck by is how people respond to the characters. It’s not really gender based. It comes down to whether the viewer is a more sympathetic person or more judgmental. In Satellite, the characters cross lines. To me, it’s fascinating when characters we champion don’t behave honorably and we watch them rationalize behavior that others might consider deplorable. Ro is definitely dealing with some fairly heavy stuff and she acts out. If you’re a sympathetic viewer, you see her as someone who is in pain and this is the way she expresses it, but the more judgmental types don’t see it that way; they get frustrated and even angry with her. Same with Kevin, Karl’s character, on top of the daring and stealing, he has one particular action that is incredibly divisive. So much so, that Karl unsuccessfully begged me to add lines to have him apologize for it. I guess what’s more surprising…despite their different intellectual experiences, it doesn’t seem to affect their level of enjoyment.

This and your previous film are about people having a difficult time with the nine-to-five job. Have you ever worked a nine-to-five?

I’ve definitely been stuck in unrewarding nine-to-five jobs for long stretches of time, but somehow, for better or worse, I’ve managed to avoid becoming a salaried employee with growth potential, benefits or health insurance. There’s definitely some things to be said for it. It just seems to me, that if you’re going to do it, you have to know what you are doing it for. This is exactly what Satellite is about.

For a low budget film, much care seems to have been taken with the look of the film. How did you discuss this with your director of photography Bino Marsetti and production designer Alfred Cooney?

We really went for beauty and consistency. A warm palette of color was incredibly important to Al and I and we had worked out that every shot would have a particular shade of red, gold or green. This really helped to tie the whole film together and assist with the fairy-tale aspect. Bino and I decided that the film would be handheld, even though the framing might be somewhat static. This was to offset the fairy-tale elements with a bit more immediacy.

Was the film shot in a run ‘n gun style? How guerrilla did you guys get?

Going guerrilla was the only way to capture a large portion of this film. We were location shooting with a reduced crew and stealing shots on locations we couldn’t get at 20 times the budget. Capturing the motorcycle footage was just insane. Karl does all of the driving. Half the time, we’re driving alongside him in a van at 60 miles per hour, the camera sticking out the window, connected via bungee cable to the van, with no way to communicate. All the subway footage was stolen. The midtown theft scene was a nightmare. One scene in Cooper Square where they drive between two cars and steal a briefcase was ridiculous. We didn’t have enough crew to block pedestrian traffic, and when they take off, Karl had to weave past real pedestrians, a bicyclist, and make a u-turn over a sidewalk for us to get the shot. That’s the one that ended up in the film. There was no movie magic there; that was 100% real.

The music in the film seems like a character as well. How did you approach music, and did you have it in mind while making the film or did that come after?

The music was something that I was thinking about throughout the whole process, but it really came together during the edit. Once again, there’s the fairy-tale aspect that I wanted to drop in as a reminder not to take everything at face value. Vered Ronen created a sad, yet hopeful score for the movie with slightly out of key, unaffected piano playing, and these simple, elementary lyrics. The effect proved to be dreamy, wistful and reminiscent of a music box. To counter the dreamy effect, heavy, intense, emotional rock music was chosen. Whereas Vered represents the innocence and hope, the band Calla symbolizes the sophistication, complication and unease.

The characters in your film take a courageous, romantic and foolhardy plunge by dropping everything. Some people might think this is crazy, but do you think sometimes it’s good for people to do crazy things to shake up their lives and reexamine things?

I think so. If you wake up one morning and realize somewhere at sometime back you made a wrong turn and your life isn’t turning out they way you hoped. If you’re not content? I’m not sure that anything you do would be considered crazy. Of course, the conflict arises when you begin to weigh your level of commitment to whatever responsibilities you currently have.

Of course, your movie gets into the moral consequences of this. It doesn’t avoid the messiness. I’d rather not discuss the ending, or the final fateful choices the characters make. But a moment I appreciated, which you never see in this kind of movie, is Kevin figuring out on paper how much money they have left, and looking a bit stressed out. Were you very conscious of not making this movie into a fantasy of escape?

Definitely. I’m almost exclusively interested in stories about people dealing with real-world problems. I think that if the story was a 100% fantasy of escape, the audience might enjoy it as such, but it wouldn’t have the potential to touch them as deeply. It couldn’t serve as a call to action. As much as I believe in the fantasy, we’re all grounded by our real world responsibilities. This is as much what the movie is about as anything else.