'Loitering with Intent' producer Keith Kjarval talks about his Unifed Pictures slate

Keith Kjarval on Loitering with Intent, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 18.

Sam Rockwell and Marisa Tomei in Loitering with Intent.

A Tribeca Film Festival veteran, producer Keith Kjarval brought the premiere of the comedy/drama Loitering with Intent to this year's event. Directed by Adam Rapp, it stars screenwriters Michael Godere and Ivan Martin as writers who are trying to complete a script despite romantic (and other) distractions swirling around them.

A founder of Unified Pictures, Kjarval is in the enviable position of promoting two other features as well. Rudderless, actor William H. Macy's feature directing debut, is a musical drama that closed this year's Sundance Film Festival. It will be released in theaters by Samuel Goldwyn and on VOD by Paramount. And Kjarval is also a producer on Trust Me, a Starz Digital Media release that was written and directed by actor Clark Gregg. It opens on June 6 in theaters and on May 6 on VOD.

In between screenings, Kjarval met in a Tribeca hotel to talk about his career. Burly and ruddy, he is a forceful, gregarious presence, outgoing, affable, and willing to dive into any topic.

Born and raised in Chicago, Kjarval traces his interest in movies to a screening he saw as a child of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It was introduced by Michael Douglas, who spoke about the process of adapting a novel to film. Kjarval told his mother then and there that he wanted to become a producer. Entering college on a baseball scholarship, he studied theater and business, both of which would apply to his later work.

 

A short stint with Second City convinced Kjarval that he didn't have the passion for acting. What did drive him was the desire to find movie material and assemble creative packages around them. Choosing that material can be a drawn-out process.

"I'm very rarely pitched projects in the typical way, from agents, for example," Kjarval explains. "I read a lot, usually from trusted sources. I know writers, I know directors, I know actors, and I want to know what they are looking at. Almost every one of my films I've found that way."

Writer Matthew Jones sent Kjarval A Single Shot, a film that the producer then built "from the ground up." For Loitering with Intent, actor Sam Rockwell—who starred in A Single Shot—brought Kjarval the script. In the case of Trust Me, Kjarval was trying to find a way to work with Gregg Clark.
 

Over the years Kjarval has built up relationships with actors like Rockwell, who appears in both Loitering with Intent and Trust Me. "He sent me something that we're going to be working on with David Gordon Green," Kjarval says. "Sam's one of those people who make you raise your game. He has such an incredible work ethic, you find yourself working that much harder. He forces you to be prepared."

Kjarval has worked with veteran directors like David Lynch as well as first-timers like Macy. In both extremes he sees his role "first and foremost" as an extension of the director's vision. But Kjarval also says he is a "hands on" producer, someone who has to put together a business plan for each project.

"A producer has to take the film from A to Z creatively," he reasons. "Apart from the director, he's the person who knows the material best. He has to defend it, oftentimes more than the director does."

Kjarval's typical budgets range from three to eight million. Through product placement, bartering, and other arrangements, he can often make a small budget seem larger—"punch it out of my weight class, so to speak."

So with Loitering with Intent, Kjarval's goal was not just to get the film finished, but do it in a reasonable and fiscally responsible way. "Just like for Trust Me, we knew that there was just one particular price point that made sense for that film. My job there was to get Clark to agree with me."

Kjarval admits that his goals are sometimes at odds with what a director wants. "It's like a marriage, you have conversations, you explain why you feel what you do, you present different viewpoints. Logical people will come to the conclusion that one way or the other is right."



Billy Crudup (center) in Rudderless.

For Rudderless, Kjarval found himself advising Macy on how to choose an editor. "Bill is a great director, I actually think he will be a better director than actor, if you can imagine. But he had not been through that process of hiring an editor. Me, that's how I cut my teeth—finding DP's, designers, editors. So we had very in-depth talks and watched reels together and agreed on John Axelrad, who had cut James Gray's films. John understands the kind of non-'ha ha' comedy that was perfect for Rudderless."
 

Kjarval mentions Audiert and Terrence Malick as directors he would like to work with. If pressed, he will admit that he'd love to make a big-budget epic with someone like David Lynch.

Is there a common theme to his movies?

"I'm looking for characters who are put into moral positions, positions that make me question what I would do," he answers. "I see myself as a 'good' guy, I think we all think of ourselves as good, but through another pair of eyes we might seem completely different. I love feeling conflicted about Sam Rockwell's character in A Single Shot, whether or not I would behave the same way given that situation."

Kjarval admits that his films appeal to a certain audience, but is unwilling to pinpoint that demographic. "I guess you could say they're for people who want something different than Transformers or Avengers—not that there is anything wrong with those movies."

He also agrees that streaming movies has become a way of life, and a vital source of income for his projects. "You can't control what happens after you've been inspired to do what you do," he argues. "But I don't believe that the theatrical experience is dead. There are people like me who still go to a movie theater three or more times a week. In fact, there aren't enough great films for me to consume every year."

Kjarval sighs about the drawbacks to his job. "There are times when I have to say, 'Guys, we are not going to have enough time to get through this, we're going to have to color it in post.'

"But we all want to tell the right stories," he adds. "You know, I can get to anyone and I can get anyone to work for a price if the script is good enough."

The other sex leads ‘The Other Woman’ to weekend win

A majority female audience (75 percent) helped Cameron Diaz comedy The Other Woman take first place at the box office this weekend. The laugher debuted to $24.7 million, finally displacing Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which had reigned supreme for the past three weeks. The Captain clocked in at No. 2 with $16.05 million.

While Woman failed to match the opening-weekend success of what is still the gold standard in female comedies, Bridesmaids ($26.2 million), it nonetheless exceeded expectations. Can it hang tough against this coming weekend’s big release, The Amazing Spider-Man 2? Probably not, but a final tally north of $60 million isn’t out of the question.

Coming in just behind Captain America for the weekend’s third-place slot, Heaven is For Real enjoyed a solid sophomore outing. The faith-based offering earned an additional $13.8 million, bumping its cume to $51.9 million. The film is poised to out-earn Son of God, which took in $59.6 million, this weekend.

Experiencing a none-too-shabby downturn of 38 percent, kids’ flick Rio 2 grossed $13.7 million. The sequel’s total now stands at a little over $96 million, meaning the film should cross the $100 million mark this coming Friday-Sunday.

Brick Mansions rounded out the weekend’s top 5, earning $9.6 million from 2,647 theatres. The action movie and the late Paul Walker’s last film underperformed in comparison with other recent EuropaCorp projects, including the poorly reviewed The Family ($14 million) and the Kevin Costner vehicle 3 Days to Kill ($12.2 million). Odds are Brick Mansions’ theatrical run will be brief and end with around $25 million in total.

Outside of the top 5, Transcendence continued to suffer the effects of poor reviews and unenthusiastic word-of-mouth, experiencing a 62 percent drop to earn just $4.1 million. Like Brick Mansions, it should tally out to the tune of $25 million or so.

Finally, horror movie The Quiet Ones earned the unenviable distinction of suffering the worst debut ever for a supernatural flick screening in over 2,000 theatres. The film was a bomb, earning just $4 million. Given similarly unsuccessful titles Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones and Devil’s Due, it seems the supernatural genre has outstayed its welcome among viewers.

Rory Culkin & Lou Howe talk Tribeca premiere, 'Gabriel'

The writer-director and star chatted with us about preparation, execution and losing your cool on set.

The word “assured” is frequently – like surprising or unique, often too frequently – used to describe the well-received debut of a new director. It means the filmmaker’s first feature espouses a point of view, or demonstrates stylistic elements, that suggest a level of directorial confidence often surprisingly or uniquely elevated above the common run of first attempts. In other words, “assured” is entertainment journalism shorthand for “this guy knows what he’s doing.” For all the wear and tear it’s suffered in entertainment journalism, it is assuredly the word to describe Lou Howe’s feature debut, Gabriel.

Lou Howe

Gabriel follows the titular schizophrenic as he sets off in search of a childhood crush. Rory Culkin, younger brother of Home Alone’s Macaulay and Igby Goes Down’s Kieran (Rory played a younger version of Kieran in that film), stars. It’s a role simultaneously compelling and unnerving.

“There are a lot of movies, American movies from the ‘70s, that inspired the structure and the approach to the story,” says Howe. “Movies like The Gambler or Straight Time, where you spend a lot of time with one character and grow attached to them, and at the halfway point of the movie they start doing more and more questionable things. They both pick up this kind of suspense pace. Because you know the character so well, you’re rooting for them, even though they’re descending and doing worse and worse things. I tried to structure the movie in a similar way.”

Rather than turn upon a change at the midway mark, however, Gabriel depicts its protagonist doing questionable things from the outset. We first meet Gabriel on a charter-bus ride. He makes friends with a little girl peering out from between the seats in front of him, eventually gaining her trust by offering her candy. It’s an innocent gesture, if one most anyone familiar with current events should know better than to perform. But Gabriel appears unable to understand why the little girl’s mother grows upset when, having lost her daughter among the rows of seats, she finds her munching on Twizzlers with a stranger. In his defense, Gabriel chooses the unfortunate phrase, “We were just fucking around.”

The opening scene establishes Howe’s twofold aim: Endear Gabriel to the audience – he’s very good with the little girl – and invite the audience to question Gabriel’s state of mind, thereby setting the stage for the film’s suspense: What next?

“What drew me to [Gabriel],” says Culkin, “was the fact I didn’t know what he was going to do next. I didn’t know what he was thinking. I was constantly catching up with him.”

Says Howe, “I think the hardest thing for me always is creating authenticity. Making things feel real is much harder than I think people realize, and I’m proud of this movie in that I think it feels like real people in real places.”

The writer-director was himself inspired by real events. “The very first seed of the idea was my experience seeing a close friend diagnosed with mental illness in his late teens…Just thinking about his experience, I started writing Gabe and this whole fictional world grew out of that.”

Howe’s desire to maintain authenticity led him to seek external resources.  “The Child Mind Institute was involved earlier on, reading drafts of the script, helping me stay true to the character’s mental state.” A community center for people struggling with mental illness in New York City let the director visit and bring Culkin, who spoke with several of its patients.

However, although “we did go and meet people with mental illness and I did give Rory some books,” explains Howe, “basically as soon as possible I did try to move out of the research phase and just think about Gabe as a person and as a human being…I didn’t want Rory to get bogged down in other people’s perception of the character or how he might appear. But really just build him from the inside out.”

To that end, says Culkin, “I had to come at it like I knew better than everyone else. I was always right, Gabriel was always right. I always felt like I was doing the right thing, even if I wasn’t…It was either the person I’m interacting with is evil, they’re a bad person, or they’re just stupid. Either way, I’m better. That was the mindset.”

For all the intensity of subject matter, Howe says he “tried to maintain a relaxed atmosphere” on set. According to Culkin, he succeeded.

“Directors always lose their cool at least once, but Lou never lost his cool, and if he did, he hid it from me. I don’t know if he did. There were times where the crew and the surroundings just sort of faded to black and it was just us. I felt very protected.”

“I lost my cool privately.”

“Did you?” asks Culkin.

“A little bit. I don’t know if I fully lost it. Maybe it slipped a little.  But, you know, there were some difficult conditions, physically. It wasn’t a physically demanding movie, but we were shooting on a beach in the middle of February. There was a very windy, cold day, with an actress in a T-shirt. I forget exactly what happened, but we got her bundled and re-set to do another take, and then as soon as she took off her warming jacket, [I learned] the camera was out of film, it needed a new chip. So that was one time I remember I ran at the cameraman. Had a little private cool-loss. But in general I tried to keep things compartmentalized and not burden anyone with extra worry.”

To keep things professional, assuredly.

A Tribeca music highlight: Clark Terry keeps on keepin' on

The hot ticket I wish I had at the Tribeca Film Festival was the first public screening on April 19 of Keep on Keepin’ On, Alan Hicks’ documentary about the remarkable 93-year-old jazz trumpeter Clark Terry, since the movie was followed by a mini-concert by Herbie Hancock, Dianne Reeves, Roy Hargrove, Jon Baptiste and Terry’s protégé, Justin Kauflin. But I’m still thankful I got to see the film the next day—it’s an absolute delight, and moving and inspirational to boot.

Terry has played with the titans of jazz, performing with both the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras. His first student was a skinny 12-year-old named Quincy Jones; Miles Davis was another acolyte. Years later, Terry would leave Ellington for Jones’ newly formed ensemble. Arguably his widest exposure came as a member of the “Tonight Show” band in the 1960s; in fact, he was the first African-American staff musician hired at the National Broadcasting Company.

His style was called “the happiest sound in jazz”—he played authentic blues but still you smiled. And he perfected a mumbled form of scat singing nonsense words that tickled audiences worldwide.

Director Hicks, a drummer and a former student of Terry’s, filmed the musician from age 89 into his 90s, with particular focus on his close relationship with Kauflin, an extremely affable, blind 23-year-old pianist with an uncanny knack for picking up on Terry’s lively vocal riffs. Over the course of the film, Terry’s diabetes takes a toll, impacting his eyesight and limiting his mobility, but his spirit remains irrepressible. Meanwhile, the otherwise confident and virtuosic Kauflin struggles with his own insecurities and overthinking whenever faced with a potentially career-changing musical competition. Terry’s plainspoken advice: “If at first you don’t succeed, keep on sucking until you do suck-seed.”

The warm bond between this cheerful young man, who sincerely feels the loss of his sight is nothing compared to the hard knocks experienced by the greats of jazz, and this wise and witty musical legend is a beautiful thing to behold. Terry’s loving and supportive wife Gwen is also a strong presence in the film, and clearly a major factor in his upbeat outlook on life.

Late in the doc, Kauflin’s fortunes change when none other than Quincy Jones, Terry’s onetime pupil (and a producer of this film), visits the convalescing trumpeter. Terry has Kauflin play for Jones, the young protégé in effect auditioning for the protégé-turned-starmaker. And there’s no doubt Kauflin deserved to be on that Tribeca stage with those other jazz greats.

Keep on Keepin’ On is a long overdue biography of a music icon, but it’s something much more: a joyous and poignant tale of intergenerational nurturing.
—Kevin Lally

Directors & star on commemorative documentary, 'Tomorrow We Disappear'

Filmmakers and former college roommates Jimmy Goldblum and Adam Weber discuss their passion-project documentary, Tomorrow We Disappear, which premiered at Tribeca last Saturday.

The Kathputli artists’ colony in western New Delhi, India, is a community riven with and composed of paradoxes. The bright cerulean walls of the area’s makeshift buildings are beautiful; they shelter

Jimmy Goldblum

slum conditions, which include poor sewage systems and an abundance of piled trash. The artists engage in centuries’ old craftwork; they also carry modern cellphones. Community members frequently bicker and become embroiled in shouting arguments, seemingly unable to reach consensus on important issues affecting the whole; community members are in almost universal accord on one issue that threatens to affect, perhaps dismantle, the whole entirely: They do not want to leave Kathputli under present conditions.

The documentary Tomorrow We Disappear follows three members of the Kathputli community throughout what has evolved into a prolonged legal battle. The Indian government is trying to displace Kathputli residents. Fifty years ago the colony’s ancestors, a group of traditionally migrant artists, settled on unpopulated government land and made camp. For half a century officials have been content to let these families domesticize the formerly untamed grounds and practice their traditional art, which includes puppetry, acrobatics, magic tricks, dance, painting, and others, largely unbothered.

So, what’s changed? A thriving metropolis, New Delhi, has grown up around Kathputli. According to Disappear co-director and producer Jimmy Goldblum, “Basically, now that there are 23 million people in a metropolitan area, they’ve reached their horizontal limit, and now need to start going vertical. So [the government] just decided to build the first skyscraper in the city.” The Indian government is working with development company Arabtec to, yes, build a skyscraper, and luxury buildings, on the land Kathputli residents have made their home.

Goldblum and his co-director and fellow producer Adam Weber are a pair of earnest Brooklynite filmmakers who have become demonstrably invested in the fate of the Kathputli artists. They call the documentary’s most prominent subject, Puran Bhatt, internationally renowned puppeteer and recipient of India’s prestigious National Award for traditional arts, a friend and family. They are insistent a great injustice is being perpetrated against Bhatt and his neighbors. The government has offered to relocate Kathputli residents to new flats in exchange for moving. They have constructed a camp of transitional homes to house the artists while construction on the flats is underway. But no one has told the Kathputli artists for how long they will be living in transitional houses, nor what, exactly, their new homes will look like on the other end. The lack of details strikes Kathputli denizens as suspicious. Until they get answers, they vow not to move.

“It’s not unreasonable,” says Weber of the artists’ demands. “It’s not like they’ll never move. Obviously, some people do say that, but before they consider moving they need to know what they’re going to get in return, how long this will be, in writing, so they can feel more comfortable.” The filmmakers have put the colony’s list of demands online. “We’re trying to make that transparent.”

Such a story rife with universal themes -- past vs. present, tradition vs. progress, art vs. commerce -- naturally found its point of entry for the two former English majors in a novel.

Says Goldblum, “A while back [Weber] recommended to me this book Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, and I finally got around to reading it about four years ago. Very late into that book the main character actually goes into a magicians’ ghetto. It was so vividly described, I really had no

Adam Weber

idea how [Rushdie] could have come up with the imagery. I was wondering if it was based on anything. So I Googled India plus magicians’ ghetto, and found a little Times of India article that they were planning on knocking down the Kathputli colony. And [Weber] and I had been looking for a long time to find a project to collaborate on, so I sent him the article, and I would say, what, like seven weeks we were probably there. It was a pretty fortuitous series of events.”

Weber agrees. “We got there and the story was happening. We fell into the lap of the story, of them getting displaced, finally, after all these years. We just kind of knew at that point it would turn into a feature doc. We came back, our first shoot, with 200 hours of footage.”

Although they interviewed “probably 15 artists at the end of the day,” Weber and Goldblum decided to structure their film around three personalities in particular: Bhatt, the puppeteer and most well-known colony inhabitant; Maya, an acrobat and one of the community’s more forward-facing minds; and Raman, a magician, soft-spoken and caught between the traditions he knows and the coming future he would rather not think about.

The directors’ interest in another book, Net of Magic, led them first to Raman. “[Magic] focuses on a magician, so we went to the colony looking for him. His name’s Naseeb. We had an interview with Naseeb, and behind him was his son, another magician, who’s just very brooding and you could tell he had a lot he wanted to say but didn’t know his place. He had a very different take on the colony. That ended up being Raman,” says Weber.

“I think the only trick in finding Puran,” Goldblum says of the puppeteer Weber calls “the most famous person in the colony,” was to “make sure you find the real one, because so many people pretend to be him. Because he’s so well respected. They’re like, ‘It’s me! I’ve won a national award!’”

In fact, all three subjects were “easy” choices. It was more difficult for the predominantly male film crew to speak with the women of the “modest, private sort of culture,” says Weber. But Maya, who doesn’t live with her father and who is one of the best acrobats in Kathputli, was different. When she was four, Maya was hit by a bus while performing in the streets of New Delhi. We never learn the specifics or extent of her injuries, but Maya’s mother tells us the accident rendered her daughter unfit for marriage.

“It’s kind of interesting,” says Goldblum, “because a lot of people have come up to us and said, ‘Could you tell us more about what that means?’ And it’s so funny because that idea is so commonplace in South Asian culture, where a mother is very, very concerned about the purity of the daughter and making sure the daughter is OK for marriage. So if you have any disease, if anything has happened to you, anything, you try to hide it because it won’t make you suitable for marriage. It’s just like breathing the air there. It’s not even a thing.”

He continues, “Whereas to us, it just seems like, are you kidding me? She’s this beautiful, talented, wonderfully perspectival human being, and it’s just so crazy” that she wouldn’t marry. Of the film’s three subject, Maya is the only one who regards moving out of Kathputli as a positive change. It’s Maya who brings our attention to the community’s poor living conditions, the trash and dirt, the pragmatic problems attenuate with living in a slum, even a slum that produces great works of art. “She just doesn’t look at the future with trepidation. She’s already gone through so much, what’s another trial to her?” Goldblum asks.

“I don’t underestimate Maya,” adds Weber, and Goldblum agrees. “If the movie helps Maya get married that would make me happy,” he says.

But the filmmakers’ agenda is broader than a marriage plot. (Although after speaking with Bhatt their ideas on love have shifted: “We’re totally on board with arranged marriages,” says Weber. “Yeah, we’re all getting arranged marriages,” Goldblum assents.) They invited Bhatt to spend several days in New York as they promoted Disappear.

Weber explains, “He’s here to support the film, but also he’s here to see if there’s something he can do, and talking to as many people as he can. And he’s especially good at it. Hopefully something will happen.”

Puran Bhatt

Towards the end of Tomorrow We Disappear Bhatt describes his ideal future for the colony and presents a picture he’s drawn. The crude, colorful rendering depicts a neighborhood-cum-tourist-center, an area where the artists would both live and invite interested outsiders to visit and learn about residents’ work.

“The issue isn’t really that we need homes,” says Bhatt, speaking through translator Grant Davis, who just so happened to be a former roommate of Weber’s, fluent in Hindi and Urdu, and in possession of an encyclopedic knowledge of Bollywood films, “it’s that we get to keep our livelihood… Our art is so deeply ingrained in the way we live. One of the really important issues is for artists that work with our hands. Someone like myself, I make puppets, beginning with a small one-foot puppet to a large 15-foot puppet. If you put me on the second floor of this building and I’m hammering away and I make all this noise, what is the person living below me going to say? They’re just going to call the police, and just say, ‘What is this guy doing? Get him out of here.’ What’s going to happen when we move to these flats, it’s not an environment in which we can work.”

Tomorrow We Disappear is itself a work of art, created for the purposes of commemorating the work and lifestyles of these artists. The film is richly photographed, with interplays of light, bright colors, still frames, and, in perhaps one of the few instances in which the effect can be called tasteful, slow-motion showcased throughout. DPs Josh Cogan and Will Bisanta were largely to thank, as were some challenging shooting conditions.

“We went during two extremely hard seasons for foreigners,” says Weber.

“For human beings,” Goldblum rejoins.

“For human beings. It was summer and winter. ..A lot of the movie is actually really beautiful because the sun was always at angle when we were shooting, because overhead it was too hot. So the movie has this diffuse light all over, the sun’s always rising or setting throughout the whole thing, and that’s because it was really hard for us to get outside.”

Yet “outside,” in open homes and meandering alleyways, is precisely where Bhatt and the rest of the Kathputli residents would like to remain.

Says Bhatt, “The question is, what’s important for us? A house, a home, a place to live, or our art. If our art gets preserved, then our home, a house, somewhere to live is just going to come out of it. If you want to give us a place to live, that’s fine. [But] build four walls for us, put us inside, lock the door -- art is finished. End of story. It’s our life. It hurts.”

Friends, fears and Facebook: Jesse Zwick on 'About Alex'

Jesse Zwick, writer and first-time director of About Alex, starring Jason Ritter, Maggie Grace, and Aubrey Plaza, sat down with us to talk ‘80s films, social-media ambivalence, and the educative benefits of trial-by-fire. About Alex made its Tribeca premiere last Thursday.
As the marketing for About Alex, which calls the movie “a Big Chill for our current social media moment,”

Aubrey Plaza and Jason Ritter

suggests, Jesse Zwick’s directorial debut bears a number of similarities to the ‘80’s ensemble drama. Both movies follow a group of former college friends over the span of a weekend. Both groups of former college friends have assembled after one friend attempts suicide. The one friend who attempts suicide in both films is named Alex (although in Zwick’s imagining, unlike The Big Chill, Alex survives.)

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a remake,” says Zwick, looking as if he would easily fit in among his cast of twenty to thirty-ish actors, dressed in the casually formal gear of a plaid button-up and khaki slacks. The Big Chill “was definitely a movie I was conscious of and I’m a fan of. When I thought about the story I was telling, it offered a structure that made sense to me, of an inciting incident that would bring a group of friends that was separated by time and space together. It bears a lot of similarities, but from that point on, I took it in a different direction… I do hope that it asks its own questions.”

Questions such as: To what degree does social media connect, distance or trick us into thinking we’re in touch? Jason Ritter plays Alex, the friend whose attempted suicide opens the movie. As he prepares for what appears to be his final act, Alex doesn’t forget to tweet. He chooses an ominous line from Romeo & Juliet: “Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.” Later in the film, we learn Alex’s tweets and Facebook posts had become increasingly erratic in the period leading up to his breakdown.

“I don’t think social media is inherently bad or good. It’s a tool, like a hammer. You could kill someone with it,” but of course, that’s not what the tool is for, says Ritter, who didn’t sleep for three nights prior to Alex’s suicide scene because he wanted to be “exhausted and calm.” Social media can give you “a false sense of being in communication with somebody.” “I really have a pretty ambivalent feeling about a lot of it,” Zwick says. “I didn’t want the film to rail against something or to praise it either. It was more just a meditation on what it does qualitatively to how we interact and our friendships. I use Facebook, I use Instagram. I try to use Twitter, but it’s too overwhelming for me and I don’t do it that much.”

Aubrey Plaza’s character Sarah is comfortably at ease with social media. To her, Instagramming photos of meals and friends is as normal as sharing a meal with friends. Her nighttime bedfellow and daytime antagonist Josh (“New Girl’s” Max Greenfield) espouses the opposite view. Josh is a

Jesse Zwick and actor Nate Parker

neo-Luddite whom Greenfield describes as “more educated than anybody needs to be,” and who is writing his dissertation on the biography of the future. What will future biographies look like when the future biographer has such an abundance of tweets, posts, photos, blogs, etc., from which to cull?

It’s an interesting question, as is the one raised by Maggie Grace’s Siri when, after Sarah observes their gathering is “just like an ‘80’s movie!” Siri asks, “Why does everything always have to be like something?” Someone else chimes in, Why does everyone nowadays talk in references?

“Yeah, that was our little Meta moment where I figured we would sort of acknowledge our influences, and yes, The Big Chill was one,” says Zwick. “A lot of John Hughes teen movies from the ‘80s as well, whether it’s The Breakfast Club or 16 Candles or Say Anything, things like that.”

Unfortunately, About Alex often misses the opportunity to probe the many questions it raises. The movie lays out intriguing modern dilemmas like cards on the game table in a country house somewhere in, say, upstate New York, which is where Alex was filmed. But it doesn’t gamble by taking a firm stance.

The director says most of his attention was focused on his characters, the individual performances and maintaining emotional veracity. In this sense, About Alex succeeds, and Zwick attributes the film’s relatability to his cast, who were able to create a sense of camaraderie in what amounted to a brief period of time.

“The actors are all busy people with busy lives, and we didn’t have a lot of time to do rehearsal. But that intimacy and shared history is a very important part of the story. I think part of it was aided by our location. We were two-and-a-half hours from New York City, in this little farmhouse in the Hudson Valley. We didn’t have great cell reception, so it did sort of force everyone to be present. They all lived in these little condos, and visited each other’s places and cooked dinner with each other. [Actress Jane Levy] actually moved into Aubrey’s condo the second night because they didn’t want to be in their own condos alone in the woods, so they spent the whole time together.”

Says Zwick, “I think there was such a blur of activity on set that I focused a lot on the actors’ performances, and I think those come across really well, but I’m interested in exploring my own abilities as a visual filmmaker and moving the camera in more and interesting ways.”

One might think Zwick’s father, Ed Zwick, a renowned producer and director of, among many other films, Love & Other Drugs and Blood Diamond, would be invaluable in providing formal guidance. And while his advice on About Alex was very helpful (“We went through a couple drafts of the script where he was giving me notes, we watched some audition tapes together, we watched some cuts of the movie later, when it was done.”), Zwick says, “He ultimately said to me you just have to kind of learn by doing it. And I definitely made some mistakes along the way, but I do think it was an amazing experience for myself.”

The former writer for The New Republic is already working on the script for his next project, which he laughingly refers to as a “romance with comedic elements.”

“I’m going to say that, because it’s not necessarily a formulaic rom-com, but it does fall into that spectrum. [That’s] another genre that had an amazing run in the ‘80s that I love, that sort of has a bad name now but has a lot of good elements. I’m hoping to be a part of that.”

Catching up with the directors of Tribeca doc 'Ne Me Quitte Pas'

We recently sat down with the filmmakers behind the documentary Ne Me Quitte Pas, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last Friday.

Dutch filmmakers Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koeverden thought they wanted to make a documentary about Belgium. Then they met a Belgian named Bob, sometimes referred to by his friend Marcel as “the cowboy” because he is rarely seen without his John Wayne hat, and Bob introduced the couple to his “Tree of Life.” Or rather, he tried to. In one of Ne Me Quitte Pas’ earliest scenes, we follow Bob as he makes his way through a forest to the specific tree beneath which he would like, one day, to commit suicide. He describes his tree as he walks, explaining why it, of all the forest’s sylvan beauties, is uniquely suited to shade his final act. But when he reaches his destination, he stops. The trees in this part of the woods have all been cut down. His Tree of Life is no more. Pause for a poignant moment of reflection, of existential ache, to recalibrate this very personal rumination on mortality.

Then Bob looks up and shakes his head. Uh, no. Wrong spot. Maybe it was over there…?

Although Lubbe Bakker says she and her partner van Koeverden decided to scrap their initial documentary panorama of Belgium, a film that would have included an analysis of the country’s

Sabine Lubbe Bakker

modern culture and politics, because it was too “grand,” their final, odd product nonetheless traverses thematic ground that is no less sweeping for being more abstract. Ne Me Quitte Pas chronicles the relationship between Bob and his friend Marcel, both middle-aged alcoholics whose family problems leave them largely dependent upon one another. Theirs is a tale of friendship, denial, illness, failure, acceptance, struggle, depression, redemption, and more struggle. Their film includes poetry and bouts of blackout drunkenness. Terminally adorable children and an estranged adult son. It is often pratfall and slyly funny while at the same time, as Shakespeare would have it, tragic. The day Bob showed Lubbe Bakker and van Koeverden his Tree or Life, or failed to, the filmmakers knew they had something. They would eventually name their film for the song made famous by Belgian icon Jacques Brel in 1959: “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” or Don’t Leave Me.

The filmmakers were granted extraordinary access. They shot weeks’ worth of footage before stumbling upon the scene that would open their documentary. By the time Marcel’s wife decided to leave him – or decided to inform him she was leaving him – both were comfortable enough with the cameras that neither asked Lubbe Bakker or van Koeverden to leave the room when Marcel’s wife told her husband she was seeing another man. Marcel did not appear embarrassed to beg for sex, just one more time, just once more, please, in front of a film crew. He was the more open of the two subjects, Lubbe Bakker and van Koeverden explain, consequently providing many of the film’s more memorable moments: a bit where his drunkenness prevents him from removing his sweater for a very, very long time, and a drunken, swerving nighttime motorcycle ride that ratchets up the tension more effectively than most modern thrillers.

Many modern viewers, however, may find Ne Me Quitte Pas a difficult view. The Tribeca buzz surrounding the movie has been positive, although as Lubbe Bakker notes wryly, the general call to action goes something like, “You should see that weird Belgian film.” Like the society in which its two subjects live, Pas is slow going. “Success is the last thing from these people’s minds,” says Lubbe Bakker of the residents populating Bob and Marcel’s small, rural town. Here in New York City,

Niels van Koeverden

the hustle is a dance most of us perform unconsciously and with little grace. But in the town where Bob and Marcel live, “You wake up at 9am and have a glass of wine,” says van Koeverden. You hang around. You talk. Some days the filmmakers didn’t shoot anything; their subjects, or more accurately, Bob, didn’t feel like it. One brief scene is exemplary: an extended take of an old woman sitting in her doorway, swatting flies.  The directors say they were lucky they had great producers willing to go to bat for them when they said they needed more time, and more time.

Because they amassed so much footage, covering a lengthy period visually evident in Marcel’s changing hairstyles, the filmmakers admit they didn’t know if they had an ending when they finally decided to switch off their cameras. The narrative arc didn’t coalesce until they began to edit, and they were careful not to influence events as they were happening. Midway through the film Marcel goes to rehab and has to speak with a psychiatrist. At the time, Bob asked to see the footage of Marcel’s interview, and the filmmakers refused. At no point did they let either subject see the rushes (although Bob was the only one who asked). Though they befriended the two men, even putting Marcel’s children to bed when he was too drunk to do so, the filmmakers tried to stay far removed from the flow of occurrences itself.

When asked if they ever felt moved to intervene when they saw the extent to which Marcel’s alcoholism was affecting or even endangering him (see the aforementioned drunken motorcycle ride), Lubbe Bakker sighs and shrugs. “He would drive home drunk like that five nights a week,” she says. “That’s life.”

And yet Ne Me Quitte Pas leaves one with the impression of having viewed a fictional character study, perhaps because both Bob and more noticeably Marcel wind up having undergone changes by the end of the movie, the power dynamic of their relationship subtly shifting. When, in the editing room, they realized this change had occurred, says Lubbe Bakker, the filmmakers knew they had an ending.

Both Marcel and Bob are doing well. Following the European premiere of the film, Marcel received such positive audience feedback he decided to go back to rehab. The filmmakers say he loves the facility, playing sports and performing in plays, and doesn’t want to leave. Bob will attend the film’s premiere in Morocco in the filmmakers’ stead. They laugh at the thought of the Belgian cowboy in Africa. Explains Lubbe Bakker, Bob’s a character.