How I Became a Filmmaker
I made my first short film during a summer break from college at Oberlin, right after I turned twenty. I called it a satire, although I’m not sure I even knew what that meant. It was about a high-powered teen-age art dealer who bossed around people several times her age, a scenario that seemed like a fairy tale but was, in retrospect, a rather prescient vision of my life to come. I cast my family members and used our home, a loft in Tribeca, as both a production office and a set. I haven’t watched the film in two decades—I’m sure I would be both charmed and alarmed by its amateurishness—but at the time it felt like one small step for me, one giant leap for womankind. It’s that kind of hubris that defines being a young artist, and it should never be beaten out of anyone.
I submitted the film to the Sundance Film Festival’s even more indie counterpart, Slamdance, and when it was accepted I felt as though my life was beginning. I booked tickets to Park City, Utah, and dragged along my best friends at the time, Audrey and Sara—two stunningly petite brunettes who made me feel both more and less worthwhile when they flanked me. There was a Facebook group for accepted filmmakers, where cheap house shares were posted, and we secured a single king-size bed in a rundown ski lodge, which we split with film bros in their thirties and their wanly supportive girlfriends. All we knew was that the festival promised celebrity sightings (I kept track on the back of an envelope: Jared Leto! Gary Coleman! Teri Hatcher! Scott fucking Speedman!) and, if we played our cards right, the chance to get very drunk using our fake I.D.s.
On our first night in Park City, we trooped in snow boots to a crowded Western-themed establishment, where men shoved business cards at us—“John Johnson, independent producer.” We took advantage of an open bar, slamming cocktails that, we were told, were lower in alcohol because this was Mormon country. Audrey, with her winged black eyeliner and side-swept bangs, even attracted the attention of the celebrity d.j. Steve Aoki, who invited us to join him at a “Motorola x Heineken activation.” After all the excitement, how would we ever return to Oberlin, eat in the sad light of the cafeteria, and take a class called Practicum in Contemporary Agrarianism?
The next day, my short screened for a sleepy crowd of a dozen people, and my glory was over faster than the sex we’d been having with undergraduate men back in Ohio. The disappointment had barely set in—all those desperate all-nighters in the media lab had amounted to this?—when I became enraptured by the short that played after mine. It was distinctly more impressive and assured—well shot, replete with pro actors and puppet choreography. Called “The Back of Her Head,” it told the story of a shy boy with a crush on a Manic Pixie Dream Girl who lived in the apartment across the way. I was certain that it had been made by an adult with years of experience—this was the “(500) Days of Summer” of romantic puppet shorts!—but when it was time for the filmmaker to take his bow a pair of college kids stood up. They were baby-faced and dressed in the knowingly grandpa-ish garb that signified indie culture at the time. They were Josh and Benny Safdie, two Boston University students about my age, and my friends and I spent the rest of the festival running around with them, bound by a desire to make ebullient mayhem.
Benny and Josh had already surrounded themselves with a remarkable group of technicians—cinematographers, production designers, actors—and after school they set up shop in a building on lower Broadway, not far from my parents’ place. That and a companion building across the street became a kind of dormitory for wildly talented indie-film nerds, a crew of boys—always boys—who attended Tisch or Columbia, schools whose film departments, unlike Oberlin’s, consisted of more than a passed-around Super 8 camera, a broken projector, and an aging professor who enjoyed talking about Swedish modernism and hugging students tightly while sighing. I used every trip home to New York as a chance to ingratiate myself with them, offering to hold the boom, to P.A., to wheat-paste flyers for screenings, or just to pay for dinner at a Chinatown noodle shop, because I was the only one who still got an allowance.
All I had wanted was to be around people who were making movies—not just talking about movies, or writing about movies on their Blogspots, like the one on which I reviewed Cassavetes films for no one, but actually making them. And now here they were. Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost (the creators of “Catfish”), the production designer Sam Lisenco, and the early YouTube titans the Neistat brothers had all taken offices in the same buildings. Ronald Bronstein and his wife, Mary, were hanging around, fresh off the festival runs of their films “Frownland” and “Yeast.” This is to say nothing of the blond fuckboys with the streetwear brand or the guy who called himself a “sound sculptor.” (Obviously, that’s the only one I got the chance to kiss.) Never in my life had I felt like I knew what was happening, much less where. But our commune on Broadway reminded me of the way my mother spoke about SoHo in the early nineteen-seventies, when someone fascinating was always doing something fascinating, and all you had to do to find it was get out of bed. Sometimes the excitement even came to my bed, as we’d all pile in to watch some misunderstood classic like “Ishtar” on a flat-screen TV that I’d inherited from my uncle Bart, entangling our limbs in that way you stop doing with your guy friends once you’ve entered your first real monogamous relationship.
In the summer between my junior and senior year, some of the guys—who were known en masse as the Red Bucket collective—helped me shoot my first “feature” film, a misguided but ambitious hybrid of vérité digital and Godard-inspired Super 16 entitled “Creative Nonfiction.” The shoot took us to my great-aunt’s house, in Connecticut, and to a commune my mother had lived on when she was my age, in the woods of upstate New York. Along the way, a light we had rented fell from the back of our white van on a country road at 3 A.M., and a fight ensued: “We’re fucked. We could be on the hook for, like . . .” None of us actually knew the amount—it could have been a thousand dollars or a million—but each guy was certain that someone else should have been responsible for properly latching the van’s back doors. We returned the battered light, straight-faced, and never met a consequence. The shoot finished with us dumping three enormous bags of sand on the floor of my mother’s studio to create a faux desert, then forgetting to clean it up.
When I graduated from Oberlin, a year later, I decided that the best use of my limited income from babysitting would be to rent a hundred-and-fifty-square-foot “studio” a story below the Safdies. Sara—my gamine friend who had accompanied me to Slamdance, a budding film editrix—took the desk next to mine. Now I wasn’t just an interloper; I was a part of the fabric of the place. Another friend of the group’s also joined our floor, an actress and writer named Greta Gerwig, who was already famous to me because she’d starred in some of the premier mumblecore films of the mid- to late aughts, which had beckoned from the shelves of Campus Video and convinced me that a career in movies was within my reach.
Sara and I were diligently shooting and editing episodes of a web series, “Delusional Downtown Divas,” that was meant to skewer the art world. “D.D.D.,” as we called it, averaged about three hundred views an episode, but it was a way to create work at a breakneck pace. We’d often shoot at actual art openings, live music events, and other settings that made our lack of a production budget look less glaring. The series starred three of my closest friends, Isabel, Joana, and Audrey, whom I’d met when I was one, three, and thirteen, respectively. At night, we partied prodigiously, in echoey lofts rented by boys who dressed like James Dean and had somehow been paid well for indie albums that didn’t chart; at the Jane Hotel, where the Olsen twins could be spotted on a Tuesday night; or in our childhood homes when our parents were away for the weekend. During the week, I sped from a job selling couture-influenced baby attire to my little office, where I edited on a desktop computer that I’d put on my first credit card and was paying off ten dollars at a time. Greta, meanwhile, used our space to film audition tapes, and occasionally I would act as her reader, running lines from scripts with code names like “Flight of the Pterodactyls” (which turned out to be one of the many “Jurassic Park” reboots). We were all in awe when Greta booked her first studio film, Noah Baumbach’s “Greenberg,” and headed off to California. When she came home, three months later, we threw her a huge party in Chinatown. I asked her how Hollywood was, and she shrugged. “Everyone hikes,” she said.
Looking back, it was a very innocent time. Yes, there was drama. A boy who knew a boy built us a storage loft and a ladder, into which he wood-burned the Springsteen lyrics “I love you for your pink Cadillac,” and so naturally I slept with him, then road-tripped with him to a wedding in Kentucky. By the end of the weekend we weren’t speaking, except when he demanded that I drive on the highway in Baltimore so that he could get some shut-eye, even though I had no license. Sara and I got into a fight when I found out that she and an older paramour had been sleeping on the floor of the office at night, which seemed to me like an abuse of privileges (although it’s impossible, now, to imagine caring about that). One time, a jilted boyfriend of Audrey’s stomped into my office with a thrifted lamp that she had forgotten at his place, smashed it, and screamed, “Make sure to tell her about this!”
We weren’t making money. If anything, we were losing it, and we were living with our parents in order to be able to afford our odd little utopia. Ariel (or Rel, as we called him) once spent hours constructing a phone system between our floors out of tin cans and twine, just so that we could tell dirty jokes followed by “over and out.” To this day, I feel a pang every time I watch a documentary about artists and they describe the moment when they first became part of a creative community, when nobody was doing it for the cash yet, nobody had betrayed a trusted collaborator or called someone else a sellout. At the time, it all seemed tentative and terrifying, impossible and inevitable. In total, this period lasted only a year or so, but it felt much longer, or maybe wider, because it was when I really fell in love with movies. It was also the first time that I felt like someone worth knowing.
I had been out of school for a year when the dread set in. However merry the mayhem of the movie dorm on Broadway, the sustainability of it all was starting to seem questionable. I could afford the rent on the office because I didn’t need to pay for a place to live, but my parents seemed less and less delighted that I was home and more and more maddened by the reality of living with someone who was old enough to drink but too young to honor a single instruction about how to behave in their home. I couldn’t seem to stay at any job for longer than five months—that was about the point at which whoever was employing me would realize that I had no applicable skills. I was involved with a fellow Oberlin graduate who was living in San Francisco, and every few months I’d open a new credit card to buy a ticket to visit him. We would snort Adderall off his “Selena” poster and fuck half-heartedly on his desk chair as the sun rose over the Castro—but it was becoming clear that this placeholder boyfriend was not, in fact, the great love of my life. Neither was the graphic designer who did Tae Kwon Do, or the lonesome ornithologist who called me every few weeks from a salmon-fishing boat he was working on.
During a brief stint as a restaurant hostess—during which I spent all my tips on cabs to work, because I was always sleeping past my alarm—I met a thirtysomething co-worker, whom I’ll call the Co-worker, and I immediately became fixated, finding him sensual, damaged, and more than slightly dangerous. I left the job but kept his number, and we began having sex in the alleyway behind his job after he closed up at 1 A.M.—ostensibly for the thrill of it, but actually because he had a live-in girlfriend, whom he referred to as “my roommate.” When I finally did see his home, a dilapidated row house that he shared with a few friends and his brother—who looked like the Co-worker would have looked had he not loved cocaine—I was shocked by the level of filth, and I had to quickly decide whether to flee or to deem it exotic. I chose the latter. I could feel the disdain from my parents and sibling every time they cast their eyes over my own pigsty of a bedroom, which was strewn with expired makeup and polyester lacy underthings from the new Forever 21 up Broadway and mix CDs that I’d stepped on in platform heels while creeping toward my bed in the dark. The rush of being newly out of college had been maxed out.
A comment from my mother—couched as concern, as such comments always are—made me aware that I had gained the freshman fifty and held on to it. So I started dieting, counting out almonds and eating cottage cheese with Splenda for all three meals. I began shrinking. I’d go into my father’s closet each morning to weigh myself after my “first morning urination,” just as the pro-anorexia websites I frequented suggested. I would look in his full-length mirror and think—with the rage of a boxing coach talking to a wayward prodigy—You better make something of yourself, kid.
It was from this place—fearing that life might just go on this way until I was too old for it to be cute, until I was no longer becoming someone new but just was—that I wrote my film “Tiny Furniture.” Impatient and hungry, heartbroken over no one in particular, I typed out the script over a few nights in my father’s office. I had been in a period of conflict with my mother that felt, to me, like a Biblical battle between good and evil but was really just about the fact that I never, ever cleaned up after myself. Looking for wine in a cabinet one night, I found a box of her journals from when she was my age. I squirrelled them away under my bed and read them, night after night. The person they revealed was shockingly like me.
My mother, as I had experienced her, possessed a temperament as even as the veneers on her teeth. She was always dressed impeccably, but with the louche ease of someone who knows she’s cool. She couldn’t be rattled, to the extent that my teen-age fights with her often ended with me beating the couch pillows or biting my own arm—anything to get her to register an emotion beyond hostile bemusement. This was, after all, the woman who had advised me not to hold her hand on the way to fifth grade because doing so would only increase my social isolation. Yet in her diaries she was lonely, weight-obsessed, angry, violated. Among the items on a “NEW LIST OF THINGS I WANT” were “a lover and please let it work to make me happy”; “to start getting my art together”; “to be more discreet—tell less of my secrets, fears etc, esp. Sex and unkind words about people.” She added, “Today I feel bad and mad. What the fuck is gonna happen to me.”
The pages—hundreds of them—became a kind of call-and-response, a conversation I was having with the version of her who once pulsated with the need not only to create work but to create a life worth living, just as I was trying to do now. It had felt urgent for my mother to avoid the adult life that seemed inevitable—her parents’ world of desperately trying to keep up, to conform at “the club,” to have daughters who reflected their solid American values. As I walked back and forth to a day job at the midtown office of a handsy accountant, heels blistering in pleather Zara pumps, I felt the same way.
One thing I could say about my mother, no matter how much she enraged me with her staunch refusal to engage with the volatility of my inner life, was that she had never demanded that I be respectable—only happy. My past projects hadn’t seemed to impress her much; she wasn’t ever condescending about my work, just hyper-involved in her own. But on the morning of her sixtieth birthday I printed a draft of “Tiny Furniture” and dropped it in front of her at the kitchen table. The script told the story of Aura, a frustrated daughter of an artist mother, and it used snippets of my mom’s journals, read aloud to the camera by the protagonist (because artist mothers always told us to write what we knew!). “Sorry, but I read your journals,” I told my mom. “You once said you wanted to act. This is for us to do together. Happy birthday.” In a move that was deeply uncharacteristic—she was the kind of mother who pinned nothing of ours to the fridge and walked out of high-school plays at intermission—she sat and read it in one sitting. “O.K.,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Within days, my mother went from my archnemesis to my No. 1 champion. She persuaded my father to leave the city for the month of November so that we could have the loft to ourselves as a set, a staging area, a catering hub, and more. She asked friends of hers to donate funds for the shoot, amounts that weren’t life-changing for them but were dream-making for me. I overheard her speaking to one on the phone: “It’s good—it’s really good. You’re going to make back every penny.” This dogged belief, this clearing of the path, made every subsequent aspect of my creative life possible.
Drawing on my film-festival contacts and a network of inexperienced but willing bodies from high school, college, and even MySpace, I assembled a crew. My producers, Alicia Van Couvering and Kyle Martin, were both N.Y.U. graduates with a level of professionalism that made everything I’d done before look like what it was: child’s play. With the hastily written script in hand, we set up at the dining-room table and began preproduction. All we were missing was a cast. I didn’t really know any actors, and judging from my brief time as a theatre student I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Jemima Kirke was the one friend in high school who had seen me as more than a comic sidekick. She had recently resurfaced after rehab in Florida and come back into my life like a summer rainstorm, sudden and pleasingly violent. She had never acted (although she later confessed to having taken a few Stella Adler classes out of boredom), but she was even more luminous now than she had been when she was the most luminous girl in high school. A realization slapped me across the face: she was my muse. She had always been the person I aspired to behave like—part Lolita, part Keith Richards, with a healthy dose of indie sleaze and a haughty sense of manners about very specific things, like being on time. I asked her to take on the role of Aura’s best friend, Charlotte, a lonely rich girl in a high-ceilinged apartment. At a party one night I met the actor David Call, who agreed to play Aura’s sexually aggressive older co-worker. (He would soon land a part on “Gossip Girl,” which at that time in New York was as impressive as saying you had a supporting role in an Orson Welles movie.) Alex Karpovsky was already a darling to the same set who worshipped Greta; I had run into him at 9 A.M. at a film festival as he was crossing the street, still drunk from the night before, and I’d demanded his number—my first agenda had been to kiss him, but, when that failed, collaboration seemed fine. He became Aura’s grumpy and romantically ambiguous friend Jed.
I’d intentionally written the film to be shot in and around my family’s loft. It would also star my brother (who at the time presented as a tidy seventeen-year-old girl), my mother, and even some of our neighbors. Before making my own films, I’d never acted beyond some high-school productions, but I had always harbored a quiet sense that I could do something in front of a camera that I wasn’t able to do in real life. Unsure that anyone else could capture the specificity of, well, me, I gave myself the leading role.
I was used to operating as a crew of one—holding the camera and the microphone at the same time, occasionally assisted by one of the guys from the Safdies’ office, who would just stand there and roll his eyes at how much I didn’t know. My previous shoots had involved haphazardly dragging equipment across town, stopping every few feet to pant. Now we tried to run “Tiny Furniture” like a real set, and I could see the difference it made. Shot with some measure of foresight, the footage seemed to come alive, imbued with a meaning deeper than anything I had actually written. Much of this was thanks to my cinematographer, Jody Lee Lipes, who had been a star at N.Y.U.’s undergrad film school. His eye had been refined by watching European minimalists like Michael Haneke and Bruno Dumont, and he had already filmed “Afterschool,” a movie that premièred at Cannes. Before Jody, nobody had ever pushed me to consider the frame, the light, or even the words on the page. I knew only about first drafts, not about the push to perfect what had tumbled out of me. Now I could feel myself growing quickly, the way a baby triples its weight in its first year. At night, when the crew would clear out of the apartment—leaving behind empty bags of chips and bits of gaffer tape for me to clean up—I would sit and watch every take, rapt, glowing with the sense that I was becoming someone new.
We wrapped an eighteen-day shoot just after Thanksgiving. I celebrated by going to Brooklyn and letting the Co-worker come on my back, but for the first time his dismissive attitude didn’t sear me. I felt as if, without his knowing, I had transformed from a silly little plaything into someone to reckon with. (It didn’t hurt that I’d stolen about seventeen filthy sex lines directly from his mouth and used them for comic effect in a movie he had absolutely no idea I was making.) We rushed to edit the film before the submission deadline for South by Southwest, a festival that was fast becoming the hub of a D.I.Y. film movement, showcasing works by people like Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, Lynn Shelton, Barry Jenkins, and the Duplass brothers. The chief programmer at the time, Janet Pierson, had taken an interest in my earlier work, accepting “Creative Nonfiction” after everyone else, everywhere else, rejected it (including the festival’s previous programmer). It had screened in a Wednesday-afternoon slot, nowhere near prime time but close enough to the action that I’d felt encouraged to go on. When we finished editing “Tiny Furniture”—hours before the submission window closed—I sent it to Pierson along with a note that was as florid as any written in the history of letters. “This film is an expression of what it feels like for me to be alive!” I wrote. And I meant it.
In the days that followed, I returned to babysitting, trying not to think about who might be watching the film, and what they might think of it—or of me onscreen, naked, crouched in the shower, weeping after a humiliating sexual liaison in a sewage pipe. It helped that when I’d shown my parents the finished product they’d nodded with the kind of respect they usually showed only to dead artists. I still remember where I was when I got the call—on the toilet, mid-stream, during work at the penthouse of a family who had five kids and a separate fridge for babysitters. Pierson had watched the film, and she wanted us to première in competition at South by Southwest the following month.
When younger artists tell me about things that might seem like small triumphs—getting accepted to a festival, getting a note of encouragement from an artist they love—I always try to remind them to celebrate those early wins. Your first experiences of creative acceptance are unparalleled, because you don’t know enough to worry about what might actually happen if you succeed. ♦
This is drawn from “Famesick.”