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| Features | |||||||
| Written by Noralil Ryan Fores | |||||||
| Monday, 18 June 2007 | |||||||
 For a while, theater producer turned filmmaker Brian Savelson was a determinist. “I thought that there was no free will really, and everything was just a reaction to a million things that came before. I ultimately decided that that wasn’t a very interesting way to see things, whether or not it was true,” he says. “Then I totally switched and began to believe that everything was a decision, that every moment was a decision, that you were just constantly making choices. Most of the time you make the same choice over and over again; a million times a day, you make the same choice. Then the one time you make a different choice, it probably feels uncomfortable and frightening, but if you were to make that same different choice over and over, you would start to change yourself.” Fittingly, in writing and directing the award-winning short animation Counting Water, a glimpse of the challenges inherent with romantic love, Savelson played the role of creator who granted free will to his characters. Without judgment, Savelson, as omniscient narrator, watches his lovers stumble over the question, “How can you prove that you love me as much as you say you do?” In a sad separation, the woman searches for the exact number of droplets of water in the ocean that define the scope of her love while the man waits, indefinitely on shore, mulling in guilt over his excessive demand for her answer. With its characters made of rudimentary materials such as paper and felt, Counting Water plays with the simple in order to tackle heavy concepts and thereby touches on with both grace and force the uncertainty felt with true human connection, how in its intangibility, it confounds and befuddles all of us. SM: What inspired you to go from theater to the short? BS: I’d been doing theater for a couple of years, and I was a little bit bored, especially with the opportunities. Breaking into theater—it’s ironic—it’s more difficult than breaking into film. It’s such a small world. I’d worked on a few Broadway productions, and it was the same people on everything. It was literally ten designers that do every show, or five directors and ten producers that do everything, and so breaking in in a creative way is nearly impossible. In film, it seems like there’s a much wider net that you can get yourself caught in. The animation was attractive because it didn’t require any money or any production in terms of other people or other things. It was just me and my kitchen floor. SM: Can you talk a bit about your use of materials and your shooting schedule? BS: It took a really long time. I actually did shoot it on my kitchen floor, and I lived with two roommates at the time. One was a med student and the other was a Ph.D. candidate in linguistics. They would leave in the morning, and I would turn the kitchen table on its side, move the chairs, set up lights, set up a little studio right on the kitchen floor. Then they would come back, and I would take everything down, so it was pretty much a ten hour day of shooting for weeks on end. In terms of materials, I did with whatever was around, whatever I had in my house. I had these ideas that I wanted to use felt for the water. It didn’t end up working so well, so I used some felt and some paper. But, basically there’s a store down on Canal Street--Pearl Paint, it’s a big, cheap art store—I went down there and whatever was on sale, I bought. Then I figured out from that what I could use. (My mom) used to be commissioned to make these painting for people’s houses, and they would be made with all the stuff that was on their property basically. She would take pictures of the house, and then she would make—it’s not really a painting because it’s all pieces of wood, shells, all sorts of weird stuff that you can find in the dirt—she would construct a pseudo third-dimensional house inside a frame and then paint it. People really went for it; they really liked having a portrait of their house made out of materials from their property. I didn’t realize until after I finished and showed (Counting Water) to someone, and they said, “Oh, that reminds me a lot of those things that your mom used to make.” There’s something also exciting about telling a narrative and having characters, having people invest themselves emotionally in a paper doll…People respond pretty strongly, and they always take themselves out and are like, “I’m connecting to some felt and paper.” But, people actually do really feel; they are able to connect to those characters. SM: How did the story develop? BS: I was listening this is Philip Glass song from I Sign on the Beach; it’s actually called “Knee Play No. 1,” but I don’t fully understand the reference in the title. The song itself is really emotional, and that’s the song that’s in the piece ultimately with the counting. There’s a counting in the background, a chorus of counting. At the end of that Philip Glass track, this announcer comes on and starts talking about these two lovers, how they are always questioning each other’s love. I just started there and took it the next step, which is if you question someone’s love and they say they love you this much, that’s the implication in the song, that it’s impossible that you would love me as much as you say you do.I relate to both characters; they’re two sides of my own personality. When I ask people which character they respond to more, it’s interesting because people will generally pick one. I feel like that tells you something about their personality, that they either pick the unreasonably demanding, abusive personality or the submissive and pleasing…I’ve had relationships like that where I was too demanding, or I was too placating. It came as a complete story, that someone would question someone else and that person would try to prove it by going on some metaphorical journey. Originally, I didn’t have an ending. I actually wrote while I was filming, and I shot pictures, figured out what I would shoot each day, what the scenes were each day. But, the ending, I was thinking originally, would be that she’d encounter all these other people while counting, which she does, but then one of those people she would connect with. I ultimately decided that she should reconnect with her old flame. SM: That’s the only moment in the film too where she decides to do something for herself—to return to land. For me, it was a lot more powerful to have her go back for herself than to have her connect with somebody out in the ocean. Then you get into this situation where, “Do we only exist because we constantly need to connect with other people?” BS: That’s exactly right. It devalues it a little bit, and it almost feels like a romantic comedy then, that she meets somebody in the ocean. SM: It reminds me too a little bit of a story my best friend told me. I’ve never read it, but I think it’s by (Haruki) Murakami, it’s called On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning. This is the way I remember her explaining it to me: There are two people in a laundry mat, and the man looks at this girl, and he thinks she is gorgeous, and he’s trying to figure out a way to meet her. So, he walks up to her, and he tells her this story about the 100% perfect person. It’s about two people who love each other, and they are walking the streets of a large city. They make a pact that when they see each other again, when they meet up again, they’ll know that they are truly in love. But, as the story goes, they keep walking these streets for years, years and years, and they don’t find each other. Finally, they meet again, and they pass each other. There’s a moment of recognition, and then they forget again and keep walking past each other. This recurring theme about the isolation one feels when one is in love, do you feel that’s the nature of love? BS: There’s a solitude you can only experience when you’re really with somebody. I do feel that way. You can connect with people, and there’s an infinite amount of points of connection. You can be infinitely close with someone, but there’s still an equally infinite amount of places where you don’t connect. It’s in those places that you find yourself often dwelling. Even between the closest people, there are these enormous gaps. This is getting way too intense, but…You begin your life by growing inside someone, which is kind of the ultimate connection. You’re fused via the umbilical chord, you’re inside and you can’t really get more connected than that. Then, on some level, you come out, you individuate yourself, have your own life, your own person, but you’re always trying to get back to this connection you once had… SM: When it comes to the idea of romantic love—which you’re right, I think, has so much to do with trying to become whole again—there are so many fears that get in the way of achieving that. I don’t want to blame fear alone for creating a situation in which love is not able to manifest in its purest form, but certainly while we have this desire to end up back in this womb-like state, on the other hand, we have this desire to be left alone because we’re much safer there. So, how do you negotiate the space of that hesitancy?BS: On some level, I feel like we’re all trapped inside ourselves, which is a similar theme in a way. Everyone is trapped in a body, and everyone is trying to get out maybe, and that’s what connecting to someone else feels like, especially in terms of sex. You’re literally trying to get out or get in. I’ve actually always found the idea of the rib cage really interesting…The metaphor is that it’s a prison, your body is a prison. There’s this idea that the body is a temple. You hear that a lot, but I feel that people feel more like their body is a prison as opposed to a temple. I don’t know that everyone is aware they feel that way, but they certainly feel this need to connect to other people and get out of their body. In terms of negotiating that conflict between getting out and staying in,…it comes down to fear, but you cannot return maybe; you cannot get what it is that you’re looking for. My romantic version would be that you would always try, and you would open yourself up as much as possible. Then, of course, you would be crushed all the time, when you were rejected or when things didn’t work out. I just had this discussion with a friend the other day, about marriage and lifelong partnership and whether or not that was something that was a realistic goal, or whether that was just a total construction based on whatever the society needed. It seems like that maintaining this intense romantic connection over a really long period of time is really unusual and that most people, if they end up staying together for decades, end up being closer to companions and friends than they are to lovers after 30, 40 or 50 years. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing, and maybe that’s how you find the middle ground between really trying to connect on every level or being crushed because you can’t. Maybe there’s this middle ground where you accept that you connect with this person in a deep way but that you can’t connect in every way, that you’ll be satisfied finding the pieces that you need elsewhere as well. SM: And, that’s what we see so beautifully expressed at the end of the film. That the two characters are sitting there, simultaneously living in a moment where they are full of solitude and full of companionship.For more information visit www.briansavelson.com. Comments (0)
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