Moviemaker Interview: Cindy Stillwell
Cindy Stillwell, the winner of the 2008 Fargo Film Festival’s Experimental category for her movie High Plains Winter, received her Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University’s film program and since then has worked as a moviemaker and professor. She currently teaches film production in the Department of Media and Theatre Arts at Montana State University in Bozeman, where she works with undergraduate and graduate students. Cindy also runs Hybrid Media, which can be found online here. She graciously agreed to share some of her time and thoughts with the Fargo Film Festival.
How did you settle on the subject of High Plains Winter as a movie project?
High Plains Winter is the third film in a trilogy of Westerns. As the final film in the trilogy, it deals with the winter season and its effects on humans, animals, and the land.
Tell us a little bit about joring. It looks like a potentially dangerous sport.
I am not an expert on joring, and I have never even tried it! I know it is a sport that is supposedly Norwegian in origin. Many people tell me it started with dogs pulling the skier instead of horses. Some of my students at MSU Bozeman tell me they grew up doing this.
The sounds and images in your movie create a unique experience. Tell us a little bit about your production process.
My process is very slow. I shoot and then edit, and see what I’ve got. I love working this way, like a sculptor. For this film, I spent three “seasons” gathering the joring footage and the landscapes, so that is three years, three winters. I then went out and gathered the audio and wove it all together. The music was composed by a longtime collaborator named Jeffrey Arntsen. We have done enough projects that we have a kind of shorthand. He used to live here in Bozeman, but has since moved to Seattle, so we did a lot of emailing and Fed Ex-ing stuff, to get the right sounds in the music sections. He sent me stuff in layered tracks and all mixed together, so I could play with it as I wanted in my software.
High Plains Winter has been shown in many film festivals, including Sundance. Please share some of your memorable film festival experiences.
Well Sundance was a highlight. It is such a well-known venue and the thrill of being included was a fantastic experience because there is this whole system set up for you as a filmmaker. Navigating Sundance takes strength and power naps. Each day was like three days in one: meeting people, seeing films (which was hard to do), and taking advantage of the panels and meet-and-greets. Sundance was excellent for networking and for the experience.
The smaller venues, like the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana, provided a different kind of experience. I wouldn’t say it was better, just different. At Big Sky it was a smaller group so there was much more time to see films, meet the filmmakers and programmers, and really connect with people. That kind of intimacy can only be found at smaller festivals and I think it is a really rich experience.
I really enjoyed Rotterdam too, although it is more of a large-scale festival. Rotterdam programs all of the short films together and screens them in one venue, so the short makers can meet and talk and see each other’s films. This is really great because here it is not like the short film is relegated to something like a pre-feature endeavor. Rotterdam celebrates the short form as another aspect of filmmaking, so as a filmmaker I was never sidelined because I had a short as opposed to a feature. We are all filmmakers, regardless of the length of our shows.