Late November. A field in Italy. Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, producer David Lawson, the actors and crew of the film Spring have arrived to shoot the final scene. This is the day: they must get the shot, and it must be a clear sky. While it was raining in Polignano (their shooting base), the weather apps on everyone's phones said it would be sunny. But the rain continued, and when they arrived at the location, it was a torrential downpour. While the forecast teased them with the icon of bright yellow sun, the sky showed only grey. The guys were getting desperate and ready to sacrifice something or someone to the ancient Roman gods. Mario, the 1st Assistant Director, told them that another crew member was also a fisherman, and good at reading the clouds. So they climbed on the roof of a nearby building, where the fisherman slowly looked at the sky for a good five minutes. After musing on it, he said something to Mario in Italian. Mario translated, "He says it will not get worse. It should clear in about an hour." That was the time they needed to set up, so the crew got to work. After about 45 minutes, still raining, Benson, Moorhead, and Lawson got on their knees and prayed one last time. Minutes later, the sky was clear, the sun was out, and they got the shot.
After the success of their first feature film Resolution, Benson and Moorhead headed to the south of Italy for their new film, Spring, which has just wrapped up principle photography. Spring is a love story about a young man, Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) who heads to Europe after a personal trauma. He meets a beautiful woman, Louise (Nadia Hilker), who carries a dark secret. There is a facebook page for the film, where you can see photos from the set.
I spent a few days with them on the set, watching them work, talking to the actors and crew and eating far too much pasta and bread. We talked about the fantastic mode, the film, the actors, the state of American independent cinema, and the joys of working in Italy. (While I now know most of the film, fear not, I will spoil nothing).
Benson wrote a few scripts after Resolution, but Spring seemed to be the natural progression for a second feature, both in the narrative, and in getting funding for the project.
"I really wanted to connect contemporary horror mythologies with something that suggests a real origin. In Resolution, Chris says that he isn't a drug addict because of some trauma, but because it's his body chemistry, that's just the way he is. That's a scene you never really seen in film, and I wanted to explore that, to look at the theoretical origins of horror with a high-concept idea."
As I said, no spoilers, but it is a kind of companion piece to Resolution, with a story of friendship substituted with a story of love. One of the things I love about Benson's writing and his and Moorhead's directing is the naturalism; they strive to create this kind of realism, to make the spectator feel that it really could be them in the characters, or that these are people they might know or see on the street. There is a grounding to the story and dialogue that makes its fantastic elements more engaging and more frightening. It's like an anthropological study of horror through a fictional story.
Polignano is a town that lends itself to the fantastic, with its cobbled, narrow streets and nightly quiet in which you expect to find some strange creature lurking in the shadows. I asked Benson and Moorhead what is was about the fantastic that made them want to tell stories through that mode.
"Would Jaws be as good without the shark? Sure, the guys on the boat are interesting, and it could still be a good film with just them talking, but add in the shark, and it just goes to another level," said Moorhead.
Benson adds, "To me, dynamics between characters are interesting, but add in ideas of the supernatural or mythology of the supernatural, and it gets more complicated and interesting."
Lawson points to the flexibility of the fantastic, in that it allows you to take more risks with the material, to deceive and mislead the audience. Actor Jonathan Silvestri, who plays Sam, finds that the crews on fantastic films are as much in it for the love of the mode as they are for the money.
This is what Pucci called the magic that's in everyday life. Sometimes that magic is fun; sometimes it's scary. Spring is definitely more on the latter side.
On one of the days that I was there, I went with Benson, Moorhead, and steadicam operator Will Sampson right down to the southern tip of the country (seriously, we could see Albania across the sea), where they were filming some pick-ups. Between that day and the others at the various locations, it was amazing to see not only how well this director team worked together, but how seamless their process was.
"Normally, director duos don't work; the more cooks in the kitchen, the more diluted it becomes, and the slower it works" says Lawson. "But they work really well together, they're so in synch in taste and style, everything just moves faster. We can break into two separate units, and it speeds up the process. They trust each other, that's the big thing."
Moorhead says, "If I think about working alone, then I'm going to have to work twice as hard, and I'm already working at capacity. So there are no disadvantages."
I don't want to suggest that Benson and Moorhead are the same person, far from it. On set, they often play to their strengths: as a writer, Benson might spend a little more time with the actors, and as an experienced DOP, Moorhead often concentrates on framing and even operates the camera himself frequently. But as Benson says, "If we weren't similar in many ways, or if one of us thought the other had bad taste, that would be a huge problem. But it's very cohesive, it's like having four arms."
This means separating some of the work to move faster, or in the case of one of the shooting days on a local farm, both suggesting almost simultaneously to include the dog and kittens that lived there in a few of the shots. I wouldn't say they have a secret language, but they instantly understand each other.
I chatted with the mainly Italian crew, and they all said how much more relaxed and kind Benson and Moorhead were, in comparison to the Italian productions they've worked on, where there's more tension and negativity. Also, it helps to be in working in a small town where most of your free time is spent with the crew, adding to the cohesion.
Not only do Benson and Moorhead like to combine naturalism and the fantastic in a story and setting, they also like to see characters in unusual places, or characters out of their normal genre environment.
Benson says, "In the development process, we try to find characters that we don't normally see in this kind of narrative. Like the Tom character [a British man who the main character travels with for a few days], he's working class Londoner, who you normally only see in hooligan movies. I want to see these kinds of characters in a different kind of movie." Nick Nevern, who plays Tom (and has acted and directed these hooligan-type British films), brought that kind of character into a non-traditional film narrative.
Pucci has been building up quite an eclectic filmography, in films as different as Thumbsucker and The Evil Dead. He said that he really liked how The Evil Dead was executed, but "getting into the horror genre in such as big way was not a plan. I love horror, but don't want to get pigeon-holed into it. The main focus of Spring is a love story, with a bit of horror, it's a dark love story, which is perfect."
While Pucci, Nevern and Silvestri were relatively easy to find and cast, finding the right actor to play the lead woman, Louise, proved an incredible challenge. According to Moorhead, there were certain parameters that had to be met: first, the actor herself had to be really smart, smart enough to be able to understand and absorb the immensity of the character. She also had to be beautiful, with some kind of exotic look, and speak English with an accent that you couldn't quite define. Benson and Moorhead sent emails with their criteria to every foreign producer they knew; two of them recommended Hilker.
Hilker has worked extensively in her native Germany, and been in one English-language film, The Other Wife. Hilker says, "Until last year, I was always playing the little bratty kid. In Germany, if you have dark hair and you look a bit exotic, you always play the bad girl. My last part was in an action film, which I enjoyed, so it's starting to change."
She and Pucci have a wonderful chemistry, and their characters are so well-defined. For Pucci, Evan is "the masculine figure, but also very feminine, a little more of the cultural feminine; he falls in love, he's being romantic and trying to get this girl to realize that she's in love with him. This is the first time I've been cast as this kind of leading figure."
Hilker was attracted to Louise as "the kind of woman everyone wants to be with. She's natural, funny, intelligent, spontaneous, but also kind of a dude, and sexy, she has so many sides to her."
All the performances I watched were great; Benson and Moorhead know how to give just enough direction to their actors, and just enough freedom to get a fleshed-out, full performance, even if that character only has a few lines.
"Aaron needs six scoops of gelato a day." That's according to Lawson. And we did go to an amazing gelato place almost every day that I was there. Most activities here seem to revolve around eating and/or drinking. Even the gas stations on the side of the highway have bars.
Benson told me, "Every single person we talked to, whether they were in the industry or not, told us very emphatically not to shoot in Italy; they said it was corrupt and expensive, the crews were lazy. They were just saying the most awful stereotypes. And none of it is true. When we approached the film commission and told them that we had a script set on the Amalfi coast (where you can't shoot), and asked them if they could suggest a similar location, the immediately told us to go to Polignano. They gave us all the information, and we got tax credits, good locations, an amazing crew."
The shooting days are much shorter (7-9 hours as oppose to 12), and everyone gets a 1 hour lunch. But don't mistake this seeming relaxation for inefficiency; indeed, things get done before you know it, the crew is smart and gets stuff done. This is a quality of life issue; you work hard when you work, so that you can finish on time and relax. And still shoot 3-4 pages a day. Several members of the Italian crew acted as extras in group scenes, and they even threw a fireworks show for the US team on the last day of the shoot. As Pucci said, this crew is bad-ass.
In a recent interview, director & screenwriter John Sayles said that American independent cinema is all but dead, due to lack of funds and lack of willingness on the part of distributors and studios to take risks, mainly for mid-level-budget films.
Benson thinks he might be partially correct, but not completely. "If you're making a film between $1 and 20 million, it's not likely to happen, unless your cast has a sales value."
Moorhead chimes in, "What gets funded in the US is what will sell, and that's fine, but other countries have film commissions and funds to give to films that take risks. Sometimes those films are great, other times not, but they can still get funding, which US productions can't.
"On the other hand, indie used to be harder, mainly because the equipment and cost of processing film was so expensive. But now more movies are getting made, because it's cheaper. There's a lot of bad films, and I don't want all films to have a low production value, but it's great that more people have the opportunity."
"You can't compare the stuff Joe Swanberg does with say, Ben Wheatley or Jen and Sylvia Soska, because of their access to funding and the difference it makes in production value; but those are all great filmmakers with great films," says Benson.
True enough; and if your film goes beyond basic comedy or drama, say when you need to have vampires or spaceships, those are added production costs. But you can work around these costs, keep things simple, and still have a great film.
Spring will be making its premiere next year; I expect it will make the festival rounds with as much (if not more) success as Resolution.
Lessons learned from this trip:
1) You can never have enough gelato.
2) Always trust an Italian fisherman.
3) Two directors are better than one. If those directors are Benson and Moorhead.