The Budget IS the Point
Filmmaker Interviews · Frédéric Da on making Isaiah's Phone
In a daydream of an effort to give this newsletter a little more structure, I’m trying out a cycle of releases. During every sort-of six-week cycle, I’ll release two essays about whatever I’m thinking about, something about my latest feature documentary, the newest Little Scraps of Paper film, and one filmmaker interview.1
I’ve done a few interviews here before (Christopher Barrett and Elaine McMillion Sheldon for example) but I’ve never really wanted to just add to the incredible pile of general interviews there are out there.
So these are going to be ultra-specific. About one theme specific to that particular filmmaker, and getting into detail about that.
To kick off this new cycle, I thought Frédéric Da would be perfect.
Fred and I met when our daughters were in the same pre-school, became friends and started biting each other. We both had to practice our best apologetic parent face when one of them had bite marks on their arm again.
Fred is a huge cineaste, his newest film played LA Festival of Movies and he made it all on a phone. I knew he’d have lots to say about the format and how shooting on a phone impacts directing.
For those who prefer to listen, the recording of the Zoom is posted below.
TL: Loved the new movie. It’s quite a step into the phone in a way that Teenage Emotions wasn’t.
FD: Absolutely. It was kind of the idea, which was that with Teenage Emotions people were like: “wow, it’s so pure, it almost feels real. It feels like you’re so close to kids” — and that was the charm and the gamble of the movie: What do I do with no money? How do I make this work?
This is always how I think: How do we do something where the entire charm is the formal proposition? There is this thing I’ve been kind of messing around with, which is using five or six phones to do a single take and film people in close-ups in conversations and then edit down that 45–50 minute single take to about four minutes to keep the pure essence — just entertaining and fun to watch, and it makes you feel like you’re immersed in the thing. And for me, the phone was perfect for that.
TL: Were you already doing those?
FD: I was.
There’s a story behind Teenage Emotions: that summer I made a movie using the phone as a regular camera — a feature — but I hated it. We ended up throwing it in the trash. But there was one scene where I tested out this thing with all these cameras, and that scene was awesome. A bunch of kids on couches talking about the different guests arriving at the party. I spent so much time watching it and editing it. It was really dynamic and fresh.
When I was at the school, I thought: wait, some of my students are talking about school drama — this would be a really good thing to use that style on. It felt different, felt fresh, and it felt like you’re very close.
Keep in mind, it’s all students filming other students, so there’s this other layer: the students being filmed would then film the students who were filming them, and create storylines like that. They’re all kind of filming each other.
And then Teenage Emotions came out and I was in this place I’m always in — what do I do next? Can I pull this off again? The question was always: am I really just going to teach my classes? I always need to do something else.
It’s very strange. You’re 25, before you know it you’re 34. But the kids around you are still 15 and 16. After a while it makes you think “I have to do something.” You want to capture the kids, because you get attached to them and they grow up so fast. And then they’re very different from the kids you captured.
TL: So this came out of a restlessness — I’ve done this, I need to push the form further, or be bolder with the story.
FD: It was both. But first and foremost: what’s the formal proposition? Why is this cool? And how do we make a movie where the fact that it’s $0 is not hindering the film — it’s actually why the film is good, it’s doing the heavy lifting. That is always the question when I’m making a low-budget movie. It has to be answered. You cannot skate around it.
For Isaiah’s Phone the radical thing became: what if we made a good vertical movie? What if we made a movie that’s actually a social drama — vertical, found footage — and it’s a way to get even closer to the kid, and make Teenage Emotions actually look as fake as I knew it was when I was making it? Where the phone is a character in the movie.
There were other movies I had in mind. One of the main ones was David Holzman’s Diary, by Jim McBride. This movie is about a guy who decides to make a diary of his life and gets a 16mm camera. It’s potentially the first real found-footage movie. It’s purely a character portrait of this guy using this tool. It’s a detail, but it’s the little details that get you excited when you’re thinking: where does my movie fit in the movies?
TL: Yeah, that’s a really important point. Because I think a lot of people are invigorated to make something on a phone now, but just make a quote-unquote regular movie — just going to shoot it on the phone.
FD: Yeah, I don’t like that as much.
TL: I can tell. And that’s an important differentiation — what’s the formal proposition, what drives this? If you’re starting from that formal proposition, how does it change how you construct the movie? We’ve both lived through years of development on scripts. Do you go: the formal proposition is different, so I don’t need to write a script in the same way?
FD: It’s pretty close. I am going to write a script, but I’m going to write it with the images. If you broke it down classically, Isaiah’s Phone actually has quite a classical structure. I was like: everything I do in screenwriting, I’m going to do it now physically. So we would reshoot things a ton of times based on me rewatching the footage. It is written — there’s just no physical typing.
When you have a kid like Isaiah — he was working behind the scenes on Teenage Emotions, I’ve had him since fifth grade, he was just obsessed with movies — I got really close with these kids, because they were slightly awkward in high school, so the motivation for a lot of them was to be part of something, to have something to do.
He didn’t really have a phone at 15 or 16, so I asked his dad: can I give him a phone for the purposes of this? For most of the movie, I’m not actually there. I’m there for the bigger scenes.
TL: How were you directing those things? Are you sometimes saying: Isaiah, let’s redo that, put the phone here — are you making those choices?
FD: Absolutely, all the time. I’m doing it based on the drafts. I’ll say: hey, show me your room. So he’ll shoot it and upload it to Dropbox. Then I’ll watch it and say: I don’t like this, but I liked this and I liked that — let’s focus on those. And can you turn it horizontal here? So we can have 10 minutes of vertical and then a break of horizontal. That’s also constructed.
TL: I felt that, and I enjoyed it — because once you get too comfortable understanding a movie, you stop questioning it. And I think you don’t want this film to feel like a gimmick. It’s easy to dismiss something so formally constructed as one.
FD: I agree.
TL: Unless the film shows it’s aware of its own construction.
FD: Which was a huge debate — and still is, in my mind — about the opening title card. This was a big internal and external struggle, with my buddies I’d show it to, with Roxanne, who I work with super closely. Even now: is that the right choice? I’m still not 100 percent. But I’ve shown it enough — in LA, New York, and France — that I can objectively watch it and go: I like it. I think this is good.
TL: I love hearing about filmmakers losing battles within their own movie — even with themselves — because that’s the reality. You’re not sure. You just go: OK, I’m going to live with this.
FD: It’s the eternal tension between making movies for yourself and making movies to be seen. That’s the constant fight, at least for me. David Foster Wallace talked about this in writing terms - he said once you get the second one, you lose the first, so you always have to protect the first.
TL: And the way you think about your own movie changes, because it’s also about what responsibility you have to the proposition of the film. If that title card was doing more — or if it’s the only moment outside the world of the phone —
FD: Yes and no. There’s one other moment at the other bookend — the a cappella sound of him drumming. I’m a little split on that too.
TL: You’re giving the audience something — even if you fight them, it’s like the Buñuel thing, a fight within a narrative.
We’ve both got a pile of movies that need money to be made more traditionally. But what’s the freeform side — you’ve pushed it quite far twice now. What’s the next iteration?
FD: I don’t know if this is it, but: putting myself in a movie. Which is the thing I want to do the least. My brain goes: how do you make that work without it being self-centred or narcissistic? And then my brain goes: well, maybe that’s exactly what it needs to be — the most self-centred, the most narcissistic thing. An autofiction, something closer to Kiarostami. Maybe the final piece of this trilogy is about a teacher who is basically a wrinkly teenager, made by him, everyone playing themselves.
Yes, that’s 5 things every 6 weeks. Weekly just seems too damn conformist.