Interview by Greg Carlson
Director Mark Wihak’s feature narrative “River” will be screened at the Fargo Film Festival’s closing evening session on March 7, 2009. In addition to winning Best Narrative Feature at the festival, Maya Batten-Young was named Best Actress and Adam Budd was named Best Actor.
Fargo Film Festival: You divide your time between teaching and making movies. How do you balance university commitments with filmmaking projects?
Mark Wihak: The window for filmmaking is tight. Essentially I have four months a year to concentrate full time on working on a film, but at least I know I have that window and opportunity. I find teaching really feeds my filmmaking too; part of the inspiration for making “River” the way we did it came from seeing students do some terrific work with very little in the way of resources. I thought, well if they can do it, I have no excuses.
FFF: I really enjoyed your “River Manifesto, ” especially the directives that seem to clash with people’s expectations of how feature films are made. The idea of surrendering control at first appears like the very last thing a director would do.
MW: Prior to “River,” on the dramatic films I’d made, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted. I wrote a script, cast the actors, then designed the shoot around being as faithful as possible to that script. In the edit suite, the cut would work towards trying to realize that original idea. But with “River” we didn’t really have a script and so there wasn’t a tightly defined path we were on. We had the freedom to drop scenes if they didn’t seem to be working or no longer seemed interesting and we could add scenes at a moment’s notice if we had the inspiration.
Working from improvisation rather than a script, and with Adam and Maya not being trained actors, I couldn’t ask them to deliver really detailed things in a scene or to repeat a specific line or gesture. So I was giving up a lot of that traditional directorial control. And because we were improvising, it wasn’t possible to do too much pre-planning, I couldn’t even develop a shot list in advance because we didn’t know exactly what scene we’d be shooting until we were doing it. I found the whole thing kind of liberating and even when I work with scripted material again I will allow a lot more improvisation and flexibility with the material because there’s so much to gain from that.
FFF: After you came up with the character outlines and cast your two principal actors, you spent some time with them developing the movie.
MW: I tried to borrow from the English director Mike Leigh’s method as much as I could. At first I worked with Maya and Adam, one on one. We talked about the background of their characters and what their characters were interested in and about what they wanted in their lives. When I brought the two actors together, I wanted them to find out about each other by improvising in character - we didn’t stand outside the characters and talk about what they would do. I’d set up a situation; Stan sees Roz over the course of several nights at a late night coffee shop, he wants to talk to her, how does he approach her? Or, Stan is going to tell Roz about his relationship with his father, and I want to see how Roz would react.
We worked together for about two months prior to shooting and by then I could kind of throw anything at Adam and Maya and they had developed good instincts about how Stan and Roz would react to a situation. Mike Leigh writes a script based on his actors’ improvisations and when he shoots they stay faithful to the script, but with the tight timelines I had to work with there wasn’t time to write a script and with Maya and Adam not being trained actors, it didn’t seem like a good idea anyhow.
I don’t know if their performances would have had the same quality if they were working from a fully written screenplay - they would have been thinking too much about interpreting lines of dialogue rather than being in the moment and listening closely to what the other character was saying to them. In the end, we had a 15 page outline, which had brief scene descriptions, and we used that as a rough guide rather than something we needed to stick closely to.
FFF: How did Adam and Maya use their previous experiences to impact the writing of “River”?
MW: Maya was a film student I taught at the U of R, and Adam was an alumnus of the U of R film program, as am I, who graduated before I started teaching there. I think both of them being filmmakers allowed them to be very comfortable with the whole process of filmmaking. The characters of Roz and Stan share some things with Maya and Adam, and sometimes it’s hard to know exactly where the dividing line was. At times, one of them would be telling a story and I wasn’t sure if it was the character’s story or the actor’s story. I also gave them a few biographical details of my own that they worked into their characters, so in the end, I think there are at least three biographies at work in Roz and Stan, as well as a great deal of fictitious material.
FFF: I enjoyed hearing how the characters were inspired by Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, two artists who certainly achieved success in a relatively short period of time. How much discussion was there with Maya and Adam about the artistic work their characters produce? I am curious about how much thought was given to Roz’s photography or Stan’s novel.
MW: We didn’t have a lot of time to develop Roz and Stan’s creative work. Maya is a filmmaker and so working with a camera is something she’s comfortable with. We talked about Roz’s photos growing out of the isolation she felt in the city; she’d photograph things that didn’t quite fit. At the beginning of the film at least, Roz couldn’t even begin to think of herself as an artist, she took photographs because she felt compelled to but she didn’t do this for anyone other than herself. Roz had a few artists she really loved, and those artists created a web of connections that she’d follow - PJ Harvey to Patti Smith to Rimbaud.
Adam has a range of interests, but in the end we decided Stan would be a writer. The poems that Stan posts on vacant building around town are poems Adam had written prior to becoming Stan, so writing is something he does. Adam developed a synopsis of the novel Stan was working on so he and Roz could talk about it; the novel dealt with things that came out of Stan’s background - growing up in a small town, an accident, guilt, dreaming of getting away. I can believe Stan would have a novel like that in him.
FFF: It is remarkable that “River” was shot with such a small crew and yet looks like it has the budget of a much larger-scale production. What are the benefits of a small crew? What are the challenges?
MW: The real benefits are the flexibility it gives you. We could change plans of what we wanted to shoot very quickly and try something else out. The entire cast and crew fit into two vehicles along with all our gear, so it was easy to move about. If an idea for a new scene came up over lunch, it was easy to swing into that. When we heard that the Shriners were having a parade we hustled over and put Roz amongst them. We also didn’t look like a film crew, so we could go into public situations like the Regina Folk Festival or an art gallery opening and people weren’t really distracted by us, we kind of blended in.
“River” was the least stressful film I’ve ever worked on because we didn’t have to worry about all the logistical problems a large cast and crew creates. The challenges were probably felt most by the actors who had to do a lot of the art department and take care of all of the hair, makeup and wardrobe on their own, and by the editor Vanda who had to work with the most rudimentary of production notes, no transcription of these hours of improvised dialogue and no script per se to cut to.
FFF: What advice do you give to your students who want to become filmmakers?
The main thing is if you want to make a film, you have to be persistent. You’re going to hear “no” a lot en route but if the film is important to you, you’ll find a way of getting it made. And you should really only make films that are important to you.
FFF: What is next for “River”?
I’m hoping there will still be some festival plays out there, and we’re working towards a DVD release to coincide with it being broadcast in Saskatchewan on the Saskatchewan Communications Network, who were a very early sponsor of the film.
FFF: Do you have any new projects in the works you can tell us about?
MW: “River’s” editor Vanda Schmockel and I are pulling together a collaborative group feature called “I Heart Regina,” which will enter production this spring. It involves 16 directors. And I want to make a long form film over the next 12 months; it’s seeming more likely it’ll be a kind of documentary rather than a dramatic feature, though I definitely want to work in that form again.
FFF: You can learn more about “River” at www.riverthemovie.com
