Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00 

On the 25th of March, the Harvard Film Archive screened Cold Weather. This is the recording of the introduction and the Q and A that followed. Participating are HFA programmer David Pendleton and filmmaker Aaron Katz. Take note that the recording starts after David's introduction.

David Pendleton  0:18

[INITIAL AUDIO MISSING] Quiet City from 2007. And tomorrow night we'll be showing both of his two previous feature films, Dance Party, USA, 2006, and Quiet City from 2007. And Aaron will be here again tomorrow to talk about the films. Just a note about format. After our introductory remarks we'll watch the film and then we'll go into a conversation with Aaron. We'll open it up to the audience, to questions from you guys. And then tomorrow night, what we'll do is have the discussion; we’ll show Quiet City first and have the discussion between Quiet City and Dance Party, USA, which will serve as sort of the epilogue for the series.

So Cold Weather is Aaron Katz's third feature film. I find the title maybe somewhat a misnomer. Maybe it's living in Boston, but the weather in Portland, it seems cool, but perhaps not actually cold. But I also feel that it's really sort of it tends to be the—at least in American cinema—it tends to be the industrial films that go for the extremes of hot and cold. You know, hot in terms of like explosions, cold in terms of you know, sort of the icy cool of James Bond and that sort of thing. Whereas a lot of independent cinema I think tends to go for the more temperate human zones of like cool and warm. And American independent film actually tends to focus, perhaps too much, on the cool, right? Because oo much of the warm tends to be corny. But one of the things that I find really enchanting about Aaron's filmmaking is his ability to balance the cool and the warm. And I think you'll see that in tonight's film. You can see it, for one thing, I think, in his use of the different kinds of spaces in the film, which alternate between the sort of public ordered kind of rigid spaces—whether they're libraries, storage units, ice factories—and the warmth of the domestic spaces inhabited by the characters. And I also think that you find a nice balance between two different kinds of time that we find a lot of in American cinema. On the one hand, there's, the time of narrative, of events that sort of march forward. But on the other hand—and this is again, a hallmark of independent cinema, not just American independent cinema—there's the sense of the slice of life or the everyday. The kind of banal moments or empty moments where people are just hanging out or people are asleep. And the thing that makes Cold Weather so different from Aaron's earlier films is this turn towards an engagement with genre. But as you'll see, again, I think he's sort of balanced rather nicely between the lockstep narrative time where events take place and the nice slice-of-life or empty bits of time that I think cinema can show us so valuably. I think that's all I'll say about the film. As I said, we'll have a conversation afterwards. But here to say a few words before the film, please welcome the filmmaker Aaron Katz.

[APPLAUSE]

Aaron Katz  3:35  

I don't want to say too much before the film. Just, thank you for coming. And I’ll be here afterwards to discuss it. The parents of one of our producers, Ben Stambler, are here in the audience tonight, to see the film on the screen for the first time. Infortunately, Ben can't be here. Ben now lives in London. But he's from Boston. And he also plays the motel clerk in the movie. So thank you all, again, for coming. And I hope you enjoy the film. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush  4:09

And now, David Pendleton.

David Pendleton  4:15  

Please welcome back Aaron Katz.

[APPLAUSE]

Aaron Katz  4:28  

Thanks. Well, thanks for coming to see the movie.

David Pendleton  4:34 

I thought what we’d do is I'll start by asking a question or two, just to sort of begin the conversation, and then we'll open it up to questions from the audience.

To begin with, I thought maybe I would just ask you to talk a little bit about both your visual style in the film compared to your earlier work, as well as the approach to narrative. Because I think that they're both markedly different, I think, from your previous work, and I'm assuming there's a relationship between the two of those. I mean, in Quiet City there's quite a bit of handheld camera. Whereas here, there are some very nicely choreographed tracking shots. There's some sort of ominous, I think those are zooms, or else maybe they're dollies in or dollies out. I get the sense that there's much more of a use of a lot of the technology that's developed for moving the camera. You know, dollies, and zooms, and tracks, and that sort of thing. And at the same time, you are engaging with certain genre conventions in this, as opposed to, again, the sort of slice-of-life nature of your earlier work. Here we have, you know, a mystery involved. And I’m wondering if you can talk about both your stepping back from the handheld immediacy of Quiet City, as well as this sort of move towards genre elements in the film. And if one determined the other? This idea of wanting to change your visual style a little bit led you to do a different kind of story, a different kind of storytelling? Or if it was the other way around? Or if they sort of came together, they sort of work together?

Aaron Katz  6:13  

Yeah, I think that the idea of making a genre film led to some of the visual style. I think that we felt that a style that was a bit more formal was appropriate for the genre. We also wanted it to still retain some of the looseness from the previous films, because ultimately, the film is about the characters in it. And we have a lot of love for the genre, but I think the genre ultimately is a way to explore the relationships between the people. So that led to a lot of different ways to approach visual style in different scenes. In some scenes that are more suspense oriented we did have a lot of dolly shots and a lot of things that are very specific in how they're choreographed. In other scenes, in more dialogue-based scenes, we often would have parameters, like the edges of where people could walk. But they were pretty loose and actors could kind of walk wherever. I usually like actors to have the ability to be able to go wherever they’d feel comfortable going, in the context of real life. If they were in that situation in real life, and not have to worry about stepping outside of the parameters of where the lighting setup is or where our first AC is able to focus. So we put a lot of effort into making sure that they were able to move around and that they wouldn't have to hit specific marks a lot of the time. And a lot of that comes down to something which I think on a film that's this small—you know, our crew is about ten people—is to trusting people on the technical side. For example, our first assistant cameraperson, whose job it is to keep things in focus, we knew that, you know, someone could be as close as we are or as far as over by where the piano is, and that he would have them in focus. And I think that that's something, you know, when you're making a film for almost no money it's hard to find a balance of someone who is technically capable of doing that and also fits in creatively with the group of people. Because you really can't have someone who's just a technician and doesn't understand what you're doing when you're working with that few people. So, I guess that's a long way of saying that, yeah, there's several different visual approaches to the movie, but we tried to fit them together in a way in that we had kind of overall parameters that everything had to fit into. And that's in terms of the color palette and the lenses we're using. We shot on the Red One camera, which one of the really nice things about that camera, as opposed to what we've made films on before, which was on just a little above a consumer level video camera, is that you can have interchangeable lenses. So we used a set of Zeiss prime lenses, which is a lens you'd usually use with a 35 millimeter film camera. And you're able to control the look a lot more specifically than you are with a video camera where you have one lens and you can zoom it in or out, but the lens you have is the lens you have, and that's it.

David Pendleton  9:16 

We've been using the word genre. I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about, specifically, what genre or genres you were drawing on for this film, and what elements. I mean, obviously, we're talking about sort of broadly, suspense mystery, but there's a number of sub-genres within that. I mean, you know, there's the sort of the film noir or the post-, the Coen Brothers-esque film noirs, or the Hitchcockian thriller, etc. Were there certain models that you had in mind, either specific films or just sort of specific sub-genres?

Aaron Katz  9:48  

Well, obviously Sherlock Holmes is a big inspiration. I grew up reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes and loving him. And also a lot of other literary things like Raffles, which Doug is reading in the movie. And Raymond Chandler books. And visually, the things that we talked about, although... We had planned to rewatch some films that we liked, but we never actually did because we didn't have time to do anything in pre-production except things that were absolutely necessary. But things that we talked about were French thrillers from the late ’50s and early ’60s, especially Jean Pierre-Melville films, and American thrillers from the late 60s and early 70s, like Bullitt, Point Blank, The Parallax View. And what all those films have in common is, I think, visual elegance and simplicity at the same time. And that's what we were trying to find. And especially with those Melville films, those films are all really about the people in them. And you know, often they're about an aging gangster or something like that. But I think applying that same technique of using a crime genre element to explore people is something that we really liked. And yeah, we're all big fans of those films.

David Pendleton  11:01  

And, if I remember correctly, I think there's a story credit, you and two other collaborators have like a co-story credit. And then you're the sole writing credit. Is that right? I mean, how did the story come about? And then, how did the story become the script and to what extent did things change as you made the film?

Aaron Katz  11:21  

Well, really, probably the more correct credit would be to have it be the other way around. The story was by me, but the writing was done by Ben and Brendan and I. But that's, I think, confusing credits-wise. That's not the way it's usually done. Basically, what it means, the story by Ben Stambler, Brendan McFadden and myself, is that I wrote a first draft that had a lot of the ideas that are in the final film. But it was pretty messy and it wasn't quite coming together. And so Brendan and Ben and I spent a couple months working on taking that first draft and making it into the script that we shot with. And a lot of that was dealing with the problems of balancing the mystery elements with the personal elements and finding a way to not shortchange either. I think often when films mix genres, it's easy to say, “Okay, well, this is really a film about the people.” And so the mystery is, either it's kind of a joke or it's not taken that seriously. Or the people are just a means to get at the elements of the plot. And we really wanted to serve both, as much as we could. And so that took a lot of balance. And yeah, Brendan and Ben lived over in-. We all lived in Brooklyn. They lived in Fort Greene and I lived in Bed Stuy. And we would go over to each other's apartments pretty much every day for a couple months, and work on the story and try and figure out how to make it work. And we made note cards, which is something I'd never done before. And, laid everything out. And by the time I actually got to doing the real rewrite it was very easy, because all the scenes were on note cards taped to my wall. And I just wrote what was on the cards.

David Pendleton  13:09  

And was the film always going to take place in Portland? I mean, if you guys were all in New York at that point, why not just make the film in New York? What was it about Portland?

Aaron Katz  13:18  

Well, I'm from Portland. And my first film was also shot in Portland, but I feel that it's not that location specific. And I really wanted to make a film that was location specific. So, many of the scenes in the movie that take place at a specific place were written into the script. And I think for the overall feel of the movie, it was really important, to me, to set it in Portland. And we always hoped that would be where we shot. When it came to raising the money, there was a brief period of time where it looked like, to shoot the film, we might need to shoot it in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Because there's a lot of tax incentives in Louisiana for film, and for all business. And, fortunately, that did not work out. And just a couple weeks later we connected with the producers who found money for us to shoot it wherever we wanted, which was Portland.

David Pendleton  14:13  

I'm struck by the use of the music in the film, which I think is used really well. Actually, in all of your films, both in terms of laying out mood, and guiding us from one segment of the film to the next, etcetera. And also, the composer is someone that you've worked with before. The cinematographer, too, is someone you've worked with before. I'm wondering, to what extent do you see yourself at this point in your career, like, sort of building a creative team that you think you might be working with for the future? And it seems like, you were talking a little bit earlier about how, because these were people you'd worked with before, you were able to sort of try slightly more complicated things or more complex things, because you had worked together already. Is that right?

Aaron Katz  14:58  

Yeah. I mean, to me, the most important thing about filmmaking is finding collaborators. Because as much as people say that, you know, film is a collaborative medium, it really is a collaborative medium. And if you don't trust the people you're working with, I think it puts you in a really bad position. And as you can trust the people you're working with, you know that you're working towards the same goal, and so when you disagree about things, you know it's not what you're working towards that you're disagreeing about, it's how to get there. And so building that group of people is really important. And most of the people that worked on this film came from North Carolina School of the Arts, which is where I went to school. Keegan, who did the music, I went to high school with in Portland. And I think, on each film, we've gotten a couple more people into the collaborative team. I keep mentioning our first AC, but even someone who's on a more technical side, I think, is really important to have as part of the team. And we worked with someone for the first time on this film, and that's someone who I hope to work with, again and again. And then people in the post-production process are really important, too. I worked with the same person to do the color correction on this film as I did for Quiet City. And having that dialogue already started as, you know, just on the level of being friends, I think, was really important in, too, accomplishing the goals that we wanted to, in giving the film the look that we wanted to give it. So yeah, I think, yeah, collaboration is really important. And making a film that was a departure from the films that we'd made previously, it was really important to trust those people, and to know that if we're going to be making something different, that all the best ideas, hopefully, would get on the table. And that it wasn't just one or two people coming up with ideas, but a group of, you know, ten or fifteen people coming up with ideas.

David Pendleton  16:48  

And that sense of collaborative effort is, I think, nicely reflected in the film, too, where it's like this group of friends coming together to solve the mystery.

Aaron Katz  16:57

Oh, yeah. I hadn't thought of it like that. But, yeah.

David Pendleton  17:01

We could take questions. Is there anybody who's ready to ask a question in the audience? There’s a couple. If you'll wait till a mic comes down to you. We'll start with this woman right here. And then we'll get to you over there.

Audience 1  17:15  

I was really interested in that rack focus shot at the very beginning of the film.

Aaron Katz  17:21  

Oh, yeah. During the opening credits.

Audience       17:24

Yeah. And I wondered if you could talk about your work with deciding shots. Yeah, exactly.

Aaron Katz  17:33  

Well, that was a shot that we had conceived of.

Audience 1  17:36

It was great.

Aaron Katz  17:38  

Oh, thank you very much. Yeah, we conceived that one pretty early on. Because we were talking about how to introduce the film, and I think that the first shot you see in a film really sets the tone, obviously, and, you know, having a really great opening credits sequence can make a film really memorable. And I know some of my favorite films have a really memorable opening credit sequence. And so, yeah, Reed and I came up with this idea of starting on a window with rain, and then racking focus. Original idea was that we'd rack focus to see the street corner that they lived on. But then we were shooting, that was before we knew what building we're going to be shooting in, and when we found our location, we saw that it had this courtyard, with these windows facing the courtyard, and it felt like there was a good opportunity to shoot that instead of a window facing the street. And we actually shot that on our day off. And Cris, our actor who's, you know, we were all incredibly tired during the movie and everyone was so glad to have a day off, but Cris noticed that it was raining when we got up and was sort of, like, begrudgingly came to us and was like, “Guys, you know, it's raining outside. It would probably be a really good day to do that shot that you've been wanting to do,” this whole time, that we've been putting off, because either, when we were shooting at the apartment, it was all we could do to shoot the scenes in the apartment within the allotted amount of time or it was sunny…. And yeah, it was towards the end of our shoot, we managed to finally shoot that shot. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Audience 1  19:11

How closely do you storyboard your film, your shots?

Aaron Katz  19:15

We don't storyboard. I think storyboarding can be useful. I mean, if you're shooting a film like Jurassic Park, it's probably essential to communicate to everyone what the dinosaurs are supposed to look like and where the dolly tracks need to be. But on a film as low budget as ours, I think a lot of the opportunities come from things that you don't expect. And a lot of my favorite shots in the film were things that we didn't expect. We do make a shot list every day that's pretty specific, but we try and be really open to what's really there. And I think that so much of it is out of our control that storyboards would be, probably, counterproductive, because we get there and things would be different on that day than they were on the day we scouted it. And, it's a lot of time and effort to make storyboards. So occasionally, we’ll sketch out like a diagram of where a dolly track is supposed to be or where the camera is supposed to be in relation to something else. And we'll take notes on the lenses we want to use, but we don't use storyboards.

David Pendleton  20:17 

There's a question over here, raise your hand. And then we'll get to the people in the back.

Audience 2  20:23  

Following up on your question, or your remark, rather, about the importance of collaborators and this being a departure in terms of genre, I'm wondering, do you see your work as being part of a movement or a moment? And I'm not going to use the M word. But I'm curious to know if this might be somewhat, consciously or unconsciously, an intention away from that?

Aaron Katz  20:51  

Yeah, well, for those of you who may not know, I mean, many of you probably do know, but the M word is referring to mumblecore, which is a label that's been applied to a certain group of filmmakers, including myself and some other people. And I mean, it's really weird for me, because it's something that doesn't feel like it's at all part of like, our-. It just feels really distant, I guess, you know? It's something that people like to write about, as you know, this group of filmmakers making films for money and shooting digital video, mostly, and a lot of handheld camera work and things like that. But when we made the first film, Dance Party, USA, we had no idea that such a thing would exist. We didn't know anything about film festivals, or certainly not film business. We didn't know anything about anything. We just graduated from school and wanted to make a movie, because we'd seen a lot of people graduate and not make films. And so we did it with the resources we had available, which meant shooting on digital video and shooting with your friends and making a movie that was very small in scope.

And initially, when people started to talk about this group of films, mumblecore films, actually, it was pretty useful to us, because we'd made a film, you know, we didn't have a publicist, we didn’t have, you know, we didn't have anything. And so, that there were people writing about the film meant that more people were interested in seeing the film, which, I think, was really good for us. And we made a second film, Quiet City, and I think that also served that film. And I think that we wouldn't have been able to make Cold Weather, if not for people discussing the film to the extent that they did. And some of that was in the context of mumblecore.

Having said that, I think that mumblecore can be a pretty limiting-sounding thing. I mean, it's a term that sounds stupid. [LAUGHTER] So like, if someone said, “Hey, you want to see this new mumblecore film?” I would think that sounded dumb, if I'd never heard of it. And so, in that way, it's bad. And also, I think that now it's often used in a pejorative fashion. Like, here's some, you know, white twenty somethings complaining about their fake problems. I mean, I think that's oftentimes how it's used now. So in that way, it could have been bad, but I think ultimately it, for this film, hasn't been very limiting. And I think that this film has mostly been discussed outside of the context of mumblecore. And, you know, I think that me and other people considered part of that movement—Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, and the Duplass brothers—are hopeful that films are evaluated on their own merits. And I think, you know, we got grouped together for certain reasons that had some merit to them, but also, I think we make quite different films. You know, the Duplass brothers, for example, want to make studio comedies, you know? And yeah, so hopefully... I don't know, it wasn't a necessarily conscious choice to make a mystery to distance myself from that. But it's not a bad thing, I don't think, to distance myself from that at this point.

David Pendleton  24:06  

Joe Swanberg, for instance, has a memorable role in Quiet City. To what extent do you socialize with these other filmmakers like the Duplass brothers, or the Safdie brothers, or Andrew Bujalski? Like, to what extent do you see yourselves, if not as a movement, to what extent are you friends or a support network?

Aaron Katz  24:28  

Yeah, I think we're definitely, we're all friends. I mean, one thing that we have in common, or most of us have in common, is finding our initial exposure at South by Southwest, which is—some of you may know—but it's a film festival in Austin, Texas. And up until the last few years it was programmed by a guy named Matt Dentler, who, unlike many film festival programmers, instead of just programming things that had played at Sundance previously, or essentially studio movies, or prestige foreign films—all of which, you know, have a place in film festivals—he went through piles of cold-submitted DVDs and programmed things that no one had ever heard of. And played them in a festival where there was the presence of industry professionals there, looking to watch movies. And, I think if it wasn't for Matt Dentler, a lot of us wouldn't have been able to make more films, simply because we wouldn't have been able to show our films to anyone and to sustain it financially. So many of us have that in common. And, yeah, we have in common making films for not very much money and trying to sort of cobble resources together. And I like a lot of people's films that came out of South by Southwest in the mid 2000s. And I think, like, the Safdies are really cool guys, and I like their movies. And same for Swanberg and Bujalski.

David Pendleton  26:01  

There were some questions in the back. Yes, there's a gentleman back here. And then, we'll get to you.

Audience 3  26:10 

Given all the scrutiny of smoking in movies, in Hollywood, are independent filmmakers hesitant to include scenes using tobacco in the movies for funding? You know, does it hurt?

Aaron Katz  26:25  

Wow! I can't believe that you're asking that, because we were just discussing this during the movie! No one has asked that question. We were just talking about how there's people smoking cigarettes in the first two films that I made. They're very casually smoking, it's not nearly so much featured as in this film. We got letters from anti-smoking groups saying—letters to our DVD distributor—saying, “How can you distribute this film? It's promoting smoking.” [LAUGHTER] And it's never been much of a consideration for me. In the first two films, I feel like people smoke in life, and I didn't even consider it, when having them smoke in scenes. And in this film, it's sort of different because it's referencing Sherlock Holmes and his using a pipe as a means to calm himself and think. But yeah, we have not so far gotten any letters from this film, from anti-smoking groups. So, I don't know. Maybe we will when it comes out on DVD.

David Pendleton  27:31  

Yes, right there. Can somebody pass him a mic?

Audience 4  27:36  

Hi, I had two quick questions. One is about the shooting ratio. Like, I'm just curious, how much you shot. And the other question would be about production design and location scouting, and sort of working with the locations, which, you know, obviously are very important for your choices. So I was curious about both things.

Aaron Katz  27:59

Shooting ratio, we shot between thirty and thirty-five hours of footage. So that’s like twelve to one, or something like that. Or no, much more than that. I don't know. Twenty to one. And yeah, often the way I shoot scenes is to, you know, I like to shoot scenes all the way through. I really like the actors to have the chance to start the scene at the beginning and go all the way through it. So typically a take for us, you know, is just the whole scene. And in some cases, you know, in some of the more suspenseful sequences towards the end, there were some more specific parts of scenes that we shot. But, pretty much in any dialogue scene, we’d shoot the whole scene, maybe, I don't know, between five and eight times, or something like that.

And then the locations, I mean, locations were really important to us. And we tried to really take advantage of anything that locations really had there. Including actors. I really like to cast people who, you know, if there's a guy who's supposed to be the owner of an ice factory, why not just cast the guy who owns the ice factory? So that guy, Jerry Moyer, was the guy who really owns JM Ice. And the tobacco store guy is a real employee of the tobacco store. And, you know, for those people, I typically don't give them the script. I just say, you know, “Interview this guy like he was a real applicant to your ice factory.”

[INAUDIBLE. AUDIENCE ASKS QUESTION WITHOUT MICROPHONE]

Aaron Katz  29:39  

We used a lot of what was there, but, you know, we had two people in the art department, and so they would oftentimes go, say, the day before and work on…. Sometimes, it was as simple as sort of reconfiguring things that were already there. Like, just for example, at the ice factory, the break room. You know, obviously that's the real break room at that ice factory. But a lot of the stuff in it was taken from other parts. So there was like a calendar or something that was put in the back and some charts about, you know, ice distribution that were put there. So usually we try and use things that were there. The apartment is the biggest exception to that. The apartment was just empty, when we rented it. And so that's all dressed from mostly rented furniture from thrift stores and things like that.

And yeah, the cars. The cars are another big part of our production design. Well, the main car actually belonged to our sound mixer, and that car was fine—the car that  Doug and Gail drive. But the GTO and the pickup were both just nightmares. Neither of them really started, especially the pickup. And also, the gas gauge on the pickup was just broken, so you had no idea how much gas was in the pickup. And it was actually the last thing we shot was the pickup peeling out of the parking lot. We couldn't start it. And we couldn't figure out why, because the gas gauge said like three-fourths full. And it was only then that we realized that the gas gauge always said three-fourths full. And so we had to go get gas. And, you know, it was five in the morning. And so those were one of our biggest production design headaches.

And last thing I’ll mention about production design. One thing that I think is a good example of when you write something, you don't think about all the steps that are going to be necessary to create it, is the porn magazine with a really specific clue in it. And you know, I just wrote that in the script, not really thinking about, “Okay, we're going to need to create this with a model in this specific apartment building with the palm tree in the back.” And going into the movie we started thinking like, “Can we Photoshop this somehow?” And we knew it would look stupid if we photoshopped it, so our production designer went out and found a model, went to the apartment building, started knocking on doors and found a guy who was willing to to let us shoot the porno shoot there, or shoot the nudie shoot there, as long as he got paid a six pack of beer and he could hang out while it was what was going on.

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]

And so that's how we created the magazine.

David Pendleton  32:31  

Okay, we got a question from Mitch over here. And then one question in the middle.

Audience 5  32:38  

On that note…. One of the things I like about this film is its use of humor. Really, really good comedy writing in this film. Everybody's talked about suspense and genres, but no one's mentioned comedy or humor. Any ideas, or?

Aaron Katz  32:57  

Yeah, well, I mean, to me, having a sense of playfulness is one of the most important things about the movie. And it really is the third element, besides the personal connection and the mystery part. I think a lot of the credit goes to Cris and Trieste, who I think are pretty funny. And a lot of it, I think, is putting Cris—who by the way, in some Q and As people have asked if he really walks like that. And yeah, he really does walk [like that]. He doesn't move his arms when he walks—and I think putting Cris in a situation where he needs to try and solve a mystery has a lot of potential for humor. And I think Cris was really good at letting that play out without being too, like, nudge-nudgey if you know what I mean? Like, to me, the kind of comedy that doesn't work is when it feels like the actors are aware that their character is being funny. And, probably, a lot of people like the American Office, but I think a good example is the British Office. I feel like it's very, very funny, but everyone is playing their characters totally sincerely, and the comedy comes from that. Whereas, in the American Office, I feel like everyone's playing their characters like, “Look at this idiot that I'm portraying,” and there's like a disconnect between the actor and the character. And so, for me, that's much less funny. And so yeah, I think for me, I try and have the comedy come from who people are.

David Pendleton  34:29  

Can I ask you a quick question about working with Cris Lankenau? Because he's also the male lead in Quiet City. I’m wondering, when you wrote the script, did you already know that he was going to have the part? And were you then able to sort of like tailor things around him?

Aaron Katz  34:50  

Yeah, I wrote it with Cris and Trieste in mind. Trieste went to school with me at North Carolina School of the Arts. And I just thought they'd make a good brother and sister. And their relationship off-screen is very much like the relationship on-screen, which I don't know if it's the power of suggestion or what, but they hadn't met each other before. Well, they met a few months before we started shooting. I wanted them to get to know each other, so they'd have some real history and not just be pretending to have known each other for a while. But, yeah, it is really helpful to write with people in mind.

David Pendleton  35:21 

And when you're casting, including the other parts I mean, to what extent are you looking for actors who are like the characters that they're playing? Or are you looking for actors who are able to convey, you know, who are sort of like charismatic on screen? Or who embody some other similar sort of quality? I guess, can you tell us about how you chose the other actors? The actor who plays the ex-girlfriend and the actor playing Carlos, for instance?

Aaron Katz  35:44  

Yeah, for me, when I'm looking at actors, it's not necessarily that someone is like their character, but that their personality—if their circumstances were different, if they had a different background, but were still themselves—that they would feel like they could be that character. And if I can at all avoid it, I like to avoid traditional auditions, because I think it's really, really hard to tell how you're going to work with someone in that setting. You know, much like a job interview, I think it's really hard to tell in ten minutes how you're going to work with someone over the long term. Someone who seems great and really qualified can turn out to be the person you really hate at work. And someone who seems all disorganized can turn out to be a really great colleague. Similarly, auditions, I think, are really hard to read. So if possible, I try and cast people that I know. Raúl Castillo, who plays Carlos, I didn't know at all, but came on the recommendation of our two producers who found financing for the movie. They'd worked with him on another film called Don't Let Me Drown. And we just met up with him for lunch, Ben and I did. And yeah, in like five minutes, we just knew that we wanted to cast him. And we weren't really even talking about acting, just talking about, you know, going to school. And he actually went to BU in the late 90s. And he just seemed like he was going to be right for the part, and seemed like we were going to work well together. Just the flow of conversation felt really good. And I think having a first meeting in a more casual setting is really a much better way to meet someone. Of course, it's a lot easier to do that if you have someone on recommendation. You can't do that with, you know, fifty different people.

David Pendleton  37:28  

Are there other questions? There’s a question here in the middle. We can get a mic to you.

Audience 6  37:37  

You know, watching it, actually, this is the second time I saw it. There's more than one mystery in it. Because there's a mystery: what has happened to the main character? Why did he drop out of school? What's he doing? And then I noticed he's sort of frozen at the beginning, and he begins to thaw out as he gets involved in the mystery, sort of reluctantly, and coming along after everybody else starts jumping on the bandwagon. Was that intentional, the sort of mirroring? And what else can you say about that?

Aaron Katz  38:16 

Well, there's a lot of character history that we talked about, that you don't know on screen. But yeah, I think that that's right. That it's not just a genre mystery, but also an investigation into who this person is. And I think that he finds out more who he is and kind of thaws out. And also his relationship with his sister starts as one that's, you know, just they're kind of living together and they're siblings. So they're close in that way, but they're really not friends or close in any other way. And by the end of the movie, they're not only brother and sister, but they're also friends and peers in a way that they probably haven't been since, you know, since high school or before. Yeah.

Audience 6  38:59  

It's so subtly introduced with this just very brief scene with the parents. It's this clear air of “what's happened?” You know?

Aaron Katz  39:09  

Yeah, well, in the first cuts of the movie, we had a lot of scenes with more exposition, that more explicitly talked about why Doug had moved back to Portland, and what their relationship was like and why he was living there, and also more stuff about him and his ex-girlfriend. But as we put the movie together, we started, more and more, to like just watching relationships unfold, and having it be through observation and having the audience kind of unravel the smaller mysteries along the way, instead of just saying, “Okay, well, here's what the relationships are.”

David Pendleton  39:51  

More questions? Yes, there’s a question from Ted in the back.

Audience 7  40:07  

Yeah, I guess, a quick question: in comparison to your other works, how scripted is this, as far as like dialogue goes, or your intentions with working with actors? And, I mean, explicitly, with like, Dance Party, USA and Quiet City, how different is the writing process?

Aaron Katz  40:28  

Well, the writing process has been somewhat similar for all three films. All three films had a normal sized script that you'd expect for a movie. It's more in the approach to the shooting of it that's varied. Dance Party, actually, is really close to the script. Quiet City is almost not at all to the script. And this is probably somewhere in between. There's some scenes that are really improvised, like the scene where they're throwing grapes off the roof, for example. And a lot of scenes have elements of improvisation in them, but also, the actors stuck to the script quite a bit. And I think that it was just that we got more comfortable with mixing different things. We talked a little bit before about mixing kind of a handheld naturalistic approach to the shooting with something that's more formal. Mixing the comedy, mystery and the personal aspects of the film. And also, we mixed approaches to acting and just really tried to find what was best for each scene. And sometimes that meant sticking closer to the script and sometimes not. And to me, the most important thing is to try and make the actors as comfortable as possible. And that has to do with what the scene is, how many scenes these actors have done together, which actors are in it. And I think in the past, I really tried to make everything one thing and I had a lot of really specific ideas about how I wanted the actors to approach scenes. And I've tried more and more to start listening to the actors and hearing how they feel the most comfortable. And I think that if they can be comfortable, and they can be truthfully living in the moment of the scene, and responding to the other actor, and keeping in mind the circumstances of the movie, then whatever performance results will be to my liking. It's not about how something is specifically said. It's more about how they get there.

So maybe one more question?

David Pendleton  42:33

Sure. And I have one more question, too. We'll take one from the audience and then mine.

Aaron Katz  42:39  

Or if anyone has any burning questions, I have nowhere to be, but I don't want to be one of those Q and A’s that goes on and on.

David Pendleton  42:45

Two questions. Alright, two more questions.

Audience 8  42:48

I noticed that the scene around Montage is-.  Actually, you know, all the different parts of that scene were in that area. And I don't know, I may be wrong, but it seemed like some of the other scenes, you know, they'd be like driving in one place and then it seemed like they'd be somewhere far distant from there. Was that the case?

Aaron Katz  43:17

Actually, mostly not. Are you from Portland? Or are you familiar with Portland?

Audience 8  43:23

Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Katz  43:25

Yeah, for the most part. Probably the biggest lapse of space is when they're leaving the storage facility, which is on 28th and just basically where that Fred Meyer is. And then they're down in Montage. But it's not meant to be so much that they're turning the corner and they’re there. It's more like a time gap. But for the most part, like, for example, when they're staking out the apartment, they do take, you know, the right route. They're on 24th and Glisan. They go up to 28th and take a left. For the most part they are more or less where they should be. You know, when they're at that cigar store that's on Sandy and they end up driving south on—well, I don't remember, exactly. But I think for the most part, it's correct.

Audience 8  44:12

Okay, I was just curious.

Aaron Katz  44:14

Yeah, I tried to. As, you know, I think you have to manipulate some stuff to make movies work, but I really wanted to make a film where people that were from Portland wouldn't go, “Well, that's not how you do that.” I don't know. There's a lot of films that will, say, have someone driving across a bridge in Portland and all of a sudden they're going to turn a corner and be at the beach or something like that, and that always bothers me. I don't know. If, you know, all of you who are from the Boston area, I'm sure have had plenty of films to watch recently that I'm sure people end up in really weird places—from all those Boston crime films of late. Alright, so another question in the audience.

David Pendleton  45:00  

There was somebody who had asked.Yeah, go ahead. Sure.

Audience 9  45:06

Would they really move the ice from one wall to the other? Like, is that something that really happened? Or was that a joke?

Aaron Katz  45:15  

Well, that exact thing wouldn't happen. They really would move the ice from one wall to, like, a hallway outside, in preparation for it to get picked up. I mean, that ice factory is really small. I mean, except for the ice machine, which you saw, everything is manual.

Audience 9  45:38

So, no dollies or anything like that?

Aaron Katz  45:40

No, there's no dollies. I mean, when they move the ice, they just pick up those bins and they put it somewhere. I mean, they move it to the hall to get it out of the way. You know, so they can put more bins there. But no, they actually wouldn't put it on that wall. A couple of people have asked that, and we were hoping that no one would notice that. [LAUGHTER] But they really would-. What? Sorry?

Audience 9  46:00

It actually seemed kind of humorous.

Aaron Katz  46:03

Yeah, but they really do dump the snow in the creek. Actually, I don't think it even is a creek. I think it's just melting– Because there's all this snow that's created from making the ice, just like ice crystals that come off of the ice machine. And they have to sweep it up and dump it into this gully. And there's like constant melting snow, creating a little creek there.

Audience 10  46:26

Can I ask a follow-up about where you got those seagulls from?

Aaron Katz  46:30

They’re trained seagulls. No, they're not trained seagulls.

[LAUGHTER]

No, I mean, I think that's an example of something unexpected working for us. That was just a shot of them eating sandwiches and that seagull flew around. And yeah, it was just a seagull that was there. And then I think part of the reason it came back is because Trieste threw a crumb for it to eat, and so it probably came back wanting more sandwich.

David Pendleton  46:59  

All right, I'm gonna ask one last question. I think, if I remember, you described the difference between your process from making this film to other ones, as like, the other ones were looser, and this film was a little bit more narrative driven. And I'm wondering, do you see yourself as sort of on a progression? Or is it possible that you would go back to making looser films? You know, do you see yourself in the future making more and more narrative films? Or you don't know what you want to do?

Aaron Katz  47:26  

I think it depends on the project. And I think that some of the films that I want to make are bigger in scope. Right now I'm working on a werewolf film. And so that one is, it's kind of like an action comedy. And so that one, I think, would be probably even tighter than this one, in terms of being on script. But I think that regardless of the genre of the film, to me, the most important thing is to explore the characters that are living in that world. And so, yeah, I think, no matter what, there's going to be elements of surprise and looseness to the acting.

David Pendleton  48:14  

Well, remember that Cold Weather opens on Wednesday at The Brattle for at least five days. Check out their schedule. And please, come back tomorrow night to see the previous two feature films by Aaron Katz. Thank you all so much for being here. And thank you, Aaron.

Aaron Katz  48:30

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

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