Interview: Joe Swanberg Talks Silver Bullets, Mumblecore, and More

Wags might joke that Silver Bullets is this week’s new Joe Swanberg indie. This meta-movie features Swanberg as Ethan, a filmmaker whose girlfriend, Claire (Kate Lyn Sheil), has been cast in a horror film directed by Ben (Ti West). Joe is jealous and insecure that his friend and girlfriend are working together, so he insists—despite Claire’s pleading—on casting her best friend, Charlie (Amy Seimetz), as his girlfriend in a film he’s not only directing, but also starring in (not unlike Swanberg). Things soon get complicated—especially since the film-within-a-film narrative distorts reality, fiction, and desire. Swanberg recently spoke with Slant about his work to date, the making of Silver Bullets, and the mumblecore movement.

Silver Bullets is one of six films you directed in 2011. What accounts for such prolificness?

I’m very schizophrenic these days. My wife got pregnant last year, and since we were having a baby in November, I was shooting and shooting. I accidently ended up with so much work. But I realized I like working that fast.

What are the benefits and challenges of being such a micro-budgeted filmmaker? Self-distribution, for example.

This year is the first year I’m doing self-distribution. IFC has put out the last five movies, I think. That’s been great for me. I can finish making one and move on to the next one. But because I have so much work all of a sudden, I wanted to try self-distribution and theatrical runs. And I’m realizing I’m going to only dabble in self-distribution for certain projects.

Your character, a film director, has a speech in Silver Bullets where he says, “The movies don’t make me happy.” The character further insists that he doesn’t make films to win prizes, make money, or get reviews. How is this attitude reflective of your career?

At the time we shot that, it was 100% accurate. I feel like I’m a little more optimistic now than I was when I shot that scene. I still make the work to get close to people and connect to people, and that’s more important to me than awards, and attention. But there are bills to pay, so it’s nice if the work can make a little bit of money. I’m not doing the things filmmakers do to make money. I’m creating a very noncommercial body of work. The films don’t make me happy, but making small personal films rather than more commercial work makes me happy.

There are many movies about moviemaking. Why did you choose this genre for Silver Bullets?

I didn’t mean to. I started out making a film that Jane Adams was the star of; she plays an actress running into all of her ex-boyfriends, who said they never wanted to get married and have kids, and now they are all married with kids. We shot on and off for two and a half years, but my mental space kept bringing the work back to filmmaking as a subject. I thought I’d go my whole life without ever making a movie about making movies. I’ve always been told it’s not a good subject for movies, but that’s all that I seem to be doing now. The real reason is that as a consumer of art, I respond to other artists’ autobiographical [work]—the books, music, graphic novels, and poetry. If this is the work that other people are making that I like, then I should stop couching my movies in thinly veiled autobiography; I should be more straightforward.

You make some pretty pointed statements about filmmaking—small interesting stuff versus the business side of art that is L.A. There’s talk about making movies as a “new form,” and you demystify the process of makeup, casting, acting, cinematography, and directing. Why such self-analysis?

The way I work—I go in without any kind of script or outline—has always been a discovery process. I want to grow from the creation of the work. I want to end the film as a smarter, more interesting person than when I started it. Invariably, the work will always feel like a work in progress, or a discovery process. I feel that this was not only an attempt to demystify, but to discover things I’ve not done in other films: makeup, working with a wardrobe person, etc. I wanted to create that duality between a small art filmmaker and a genre guy in the business making bigger movies. That’s true in my own life, my friends are directing Hollywood films and making TV shows, and I’m always making my small relationship stuff and getting to witness this other stuff as well.

You tend to work with friends and fellow filmmakers: Ti West, Larry Fessenden. How much do you rely on them to help bring your vision to the screen?

I rely on my actors a lot to bring life to the movie. I have rough sketches of themes and scenes. I build the film around the people. Once I have the cast in place, I’ll shape the movie to who they are. I’m grateful to my actors; it’s a big commitment to work with me. They need to be open to exposing themselves. It’s very different than receiving a script and shaping a performance out of someone else’s material.

What filmmakers inspire you?

That changes all the time. When I first got into movies, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers. That ’80s wave of cool New York indie filmmakers. These days, man, I don’t know. Eric Rohmer is a big inspiration lately. Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger Is Dead. That James Gray movie, Two Lovers. Herzog, and von Trier, and Sayles; their personas are inspirational to me. All three have made moves that I love and movies that I don’t like at all. Also Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood. They have huge bodies of work; making a movie or two a year, and building a big body of work, where the work as a whole is more interesting than the individual films. I tend to get inspired by the people, more than the work they make. I only see one movie a year that really knocks me out, like Dillinger Is Dead. I’ve gotten snobby and picky about what I like. I read a lot. These days, Don DeLillo is a much bigger influence on my thought process. I just started reading Phillip Roth. I also just read Rabbit Run. Even though my films don’t resemble them, that’s what’s running through my brain.

Silver Bullets features a simple plot about jealousy, and is unscripted. Why is this improvised format ideal for your work?

It allows me to jump right into the production, which is the part of the process with is most gratifying to me. I don’t want to spend a year writing a script, doing casting, and wardrobe, etc. I want to be on set with the actors. I finish one film and can make another one right after. That’s been the process because there hasn’t been time for me to stop. I have the idea for the next movie midway through the one I’m making.

Why do you choose to act in your films?

At first, I did it out of convenience, because it was such a small production, it was one less schedule to figure out. But I liked it. It’s still one of the slightly enjoyable aspects to me. I’ve been acting a lot in other people’s movies for the last two years. Because my films are improvised and loosely outlined, it’s a lot easier for me to direct from within, so I can steer improvised conversations, and say what I mean, rather than have to explain to someone else. I become part of the process. I get burned out and don’t act in one, but I am always drawn back into it.

You have overlapping visual styles and different stocks in the film—the film-within-a-film sequences, for example. How did you develop the visual approach to Silver Bullets?

We wanted to use dead formats, like Super 8, Polaroids, and VHS—things that won’t be around in five years, to make a weird time capsule. That was an early, loose idea, so any chance we could use a VHS tape, or shoot Super 8, we worked that in there. The main look…I’ve been anti-tripod for a really long time, a Dogme 95 hangover. I reached a point where I was doing the same thing over and over, and this may be why the movies weren’t making me happy. So I took all the things I called bullshit on earlier and did them. I used a tripod and kept a scene rolling for five minutes. I used music. Silver Bullets became the venue for all of them to suddenly appear. I read Néster Almendros’s Man with a Camera and he writes about working with Rohmer and developing the single light source. So we exposed a scene for a lamp and let the rest fall into darkness. Klute, shot by Gordon Willis, was another influence.

You have a nod to the “mirror” shot where a character unexpectedly pops up in a mirror, a shower scene, and other key elements familiar from so many horror films, such as the dragging of a character through blood. Did you have a checklist for creating an homage to the genre?

No, but working with Ti and Larry, and wanting to incorporate some of the genre stuff, it was natural for all the classic horror-movie shots to end up in Silver Bullets. We worked on the film for so long—two and a half years—that we thought, “What can we do that we have a genre moment?” Two months in, I wanted the last half hour to function like a classic horror movie. But I’m not capable of doing it. No matter what I set out to make, I always make a relationship genre [film]. I thought a relationship movie would morph into a horror movie, but it didn’t feel like me, and so we kept reshooting. But I did know from the beginning I did want a few horror moments in there.

How did you choreograph the seduction scenes—between Ethan and Charlie, or when Claire, topless and in a mask, tries to get Ethan’s attention? The film’s point about relationships is such that Ethan and Claire need to be on an even keel, or that they look up to each other.

In my experiences, directors and their actors are always in very weird competitive power struggles with each other. But when you build in a romantic relationship, it becomes dangerous territory for people’s emotions and egos. I know director/actor relationships, but the romantic aspect of it I’m guessing at. I am pulling from others’ experiences, because I’ve been in a stable relationship for a long time. I wanted to make that romantic relationship exist as a movie relationship. The [characters] can create art together and it works for them, but what happens when they start making art with other people? For the mask/seduction scene, I wanted to have Claire perform for Ethan—to get his attention. The same with Charlie. I’ve been exploring that for a while in Alexander the Last, for example. I’m envious of actors who have this magical selfishness that draws people to them. I don’t think I have that. I wanted to use the werewolf mythology [human by day who transform into something else at night] to reflect how actors are socially allowed to have experiences where they play another creature and have permission to behave in different ways, but when the movie is over, they go back to reality. They are constantly affected by the fake-world decisions they are making in the real world.

As someone who is so associated with the mumblecore movement, how do you think mumblecore films have evolved over time?

The name itself is silly, and a little insulting. But as time has passed, I was lucky to be affiliated with something that was so easy to remember, and a marketable movement of small, noncommercial films. I’ve seen [indie filmmakers] struggle to find an audience for their work, but the mumblecore folks find distributors. It’s so difficult to get [attention/distribution for] films without stars, and mumblecore became a marquee for that. It’s not something that was engineered. Andrew Bujalski said it, people picked up on it, and now I get to make movies because this genre exists. For a certain cinephile crowd, however, mumblecore is like a swear word. It’s exposed my work to lots of people, but it keeps people who didn’t like my older films from seeing new ones, which are really different.