When filmmaker Ronald Bronstein speaks about his characters, there’s a depth of knowledge intrinsic. It’s as if these carefully etched studies of human nature, captured in characters such as the ever inarticulate Keith or hyper-intellectual Charles from Bronstein’s feature debut Frownland, were his friends or acquaintances. One can’t escape the feeling that were they real, his talk would be little more than gossip. “Keith’s total inability to read social cues—it’s hardly a saintly quality, but at the same time, there’s nothing malicious about him. It’s just that he’s such a flailing failure at connecting with other people.”

In this director, the willingness to delve into character and mine even the slightest nuance of his creation is done both unselfishly and without judgment. After more than five years of production and post, Bronstein knows his world completely. Frownland follows the gratingly awkward but oddly endearing door-to-door coupon salesman Keith as he tries and fails on multiple occasions to communicate with other people. In interacting with his hyper-intellectual and pretentious roommate Charles, dismissive best friend stand-in Sandy and possible and probably suicidal love interest Laura, Keith is grossly incapable of coherent expression. His stumbles and silences barricade him from them, and at times his communicative messiness is both fodder for empathy and pity. In crafting all of this, there’s a confidence to Bronstein’s knowledge and the way he expresses it.

It’s little wonder then that Frownland received as much support and confidence as it did when it hit South by Southwest this year, although that support came in a strange package. Critics and filmmakers alike jumped on the feature with enthusiasm, but all felt a need to place disclaimers of ‘challenging’ or ‘uncompromising vision’ on the work. As Filmmaker Magazine editor Scott Macaulay put it: “Bronstein's first feature is the kind of outsider cinema that deliberately pushes an audience's patience and thus is easy to dismiss by those unwilling to approach the film on the terms it lays out for itself.”

And, so even by its numerous reviews, most all of which have been positive, Frownland is in a sticky situation whereby its media lauds it as a break-out film with a strong directorial voice yet finds itself dubbed simply too difficult for the mainstream, even goodness, the mainstream independent scene. That’s all excluding the fact that few have found, or at least publicly expressed, how funny Frownland actually is.

Granted, in a quick agreement with the other reviews, Frownland handles human behavior and philosophy with intelligence, which may in some circumstances qualify as challenging. “I don’t have an intention at all with filmmaking to at least be naked philosophically, to sort of grandstand or spout. I’m not looking to make a thesis,” Bronstein says. “I’m looking to show life and behavior and to keep all the sort of sloppiness and slipshod, roundabout quality of the way those elements in life unfold, to keep that intact and not reduce it to a shorthand.”

While preparing for tonight’s IFC screening of the film, Bronstein kindly put aside an hour to speak more about the development of his characters and the humanist bend of his work.

SM: This has been mentioned before, the otherness, of Keith’s character. As a person, just in daily life, even if I don’t react in that strange way, I feel a lot of those same things. It’s just a matter of covering them up or hiding them. It’s like, “Don’t become the completely inarticulate person that you actually are.”

RB: In terms of the idea of “the other,” in my limited experiences in life, it seems the goal is to break free out of your own calcified point-of-view. That’s the definition of humanism in a way: to sympathetically be engaged with other people’s points of views.

With Keith—there’s a kind of person that I think everybody in the world runs into every once in a while, and it’s somebody that provokes almost a knee jerk antipathy. You run into people every once in a while that are just off. It’s almost Darwinian. You run into them, and you just want to push them out of your sphere, almost like putting two magnets together. You just want to get away as quickly as possible. It’s the type of person that if they stop you on the street and ask you for directions, you find yourself instinctively telling them that you don’t live in the neighborhood. You don’t know where they need to go, even though you do. It’s just because you want to get away as quickly as possible, back to your safety zone. Those people, they don’t occupy enough real estate in your brain to question whether that antipathy is justified. You just push them away and go about your business.

There’s something about the nature of a movie theater where you’re allowing yourself to be held captive for a couple of hours. That’s sort of the concept behind the work, is to put someone in a position where they are forced to engage with this person who they’d instantly and instinctively reject in life.

SM: For me, this is hard because I didn’t feel that knee jerk antipathy toward the character at all. I immediately liked him.

RB: Oh, right on.

SM: My favorite scene is the one between Keith and Charles when they’ve got the candle lights. [Throughout the film Keith has pushed for Charles to pay the electric bill. By this point in the story, the out-of-work Charles still hasn’t, and needless to say the two are pitched into a dark apartment.]

RB: Oh, the final confrontation. By that point in the movie—Keith has sort of left the movie for about fifteen minutes there to give the audience a breather—hopefully that’s where it solidifies, and you’re completely behind him, if only because there’s nobody else to get behind. I think he’s almost noble in that scene.

SM: That’s the only scene in which he steps up. Especially in the door-to-door sequences, it seems to me as if the self-denigration of Keith’s character borders on egocentricity and selfishness.

RB: Self-deprecation is a like a crutch for him, you know? It’s an unpleasant thing, and it’s a pattern I fell into in my twenties too, where you stave off rejection from others by rejecting yourself from the very beginning, the second an encounter begins. It’s an unpleasant way to deal with other people.

SM: Or to deal with yourself even…Now, when you and (lead actor Dore Mann) were working where were you coming from in saying, “What happened in Keith’s childhood?”

RB: We did a massive amount of back-story work. I met Dore actually at a family funeral of all places. He approached me and told me that we were cousins, which isn’t exactly true. We’re what’s called cousins-in-common, which means that my third cousin is cousins with his third cousin or something absurd like that. I knew instantly that I wanted to work with him. He has more nervous energy than anyone I’ve ever met in my entire life…There are also a lot of other elements of Dore, the person: he’s incredibly smart; he’s really funny; he’s really likeable. These are elements that obviously were not, did not fit the scope of the project. So, in the creation of his character, the goal was to isolate the more dysfunctional elements of his personality, sort of strip them away, bleach them away and then just build a character from that essential point.

In the process, we did work out a lot of things, with real life things that happened to him in his childhood because he did have a pretty unhappy one; not a lot of love in his upbringing. We would get these stories done on paper, work with them and fictionalize them. A big part in the process—it almost sounds pretentious to articulate it but—on top of Dore’s shoulders, or Keith’s shoulders, was his father, which he sculpted as a very impotent person...He was unemployed and somebody who was humiliated daily in his own household. He was somebody who was not allowed to play the patriarch. A big part of Keith’s character, his insecurities stem from his fear that he’s going to be stepped on, and he’s going end up the same way, that he’s going to become this second-class citizen for the world. In a way, it stunted his growth, this fear that he’s going to end up like that. It created a character that puts him in a position that only people can treat him like that. His self-esteem is so low, and he’s constantly measuring everyone against the pre-determined rejection.

To make a short story long, and now I’ll make it short again, a lot of the work that we did did focus on what his childhood was like and then strip that away and not necessarily force it into dialogue in the film, just hope that what remained was the emotional tip of the iceberg. You can sense the weight there, but it wasn’t necessarily important for me to cajole that information out as dialogue, although it does end up all coming out when he has his confrontation with Sandy in the stairwell. You can see he’s got so much to say. All the sudden this paranoia and all this fear is just getting vomited out all at once.

He’s completely incoherent in that scene. He’s just had this fight with Charles, and it’s so unlike him to get violent that suddenly he’s feeling the need to justify his actions. He’s got about fifteen different stories from his childhood that he could use to justify his actions and were he to calm down and speak from a calm point-of-view, he would be able to tell any one of those stories coherently. But, he’s so hyped up and so hopped up, and he already has such a hard time communicating, that it comes across as this big, muddled soup...

SM: Do you think that Sandy’s right in that scene then, to tell him to calm down and the way he tells him to calm down?

RB: If you watch the film from Keith’s point-of-view, you can see that he’s being grossly misunderstood, that were he with a sympathetic ear, were he with a person who was willing to say, “Calm down. Tell me what you have to say,” the conversation could have progressed successfully, positively. But, he’s become such a monster at that point. He’s such a brute, seething mess that you can’t really blame Sandy for being off put. He’s got this guy at three in the morning screaming in his hallway.

SM: But, we don’t really know where Sandy’s anger comes from and his dissociation from this character.

RB: He’s sort of the most opaque character in the movie in a way. In attempting to make all these narrative pivots, it was important to create a character that would be the stand-in for Keith’s best friend. (Keith’s) incapable of really having a friend; he’s incapable of nurturing a friendly rapport with somebody. At the same point, who would be the figure in his life that would be the closest to a best friend, you know? The only dynamic that I could envision was somebody who was so passive aggressive, so passive rather, that the relationship is only forwarded on the slim and shaky grounds that this guy is incapable of saying, “Get the fuck out of my apartment.” Keith sort of takes advantage of that.

SM: About the relationship between Keith and Sandy, I started thinking when I was watching that dynamic that it reminded me of The Conformist, not necessarily the movie so much as the book.

RB: I haven’t read the book, and the movie isn’t something that I’ve drawn from. But, go on I’m curious.

SM: The book overtly deals with philosophy and the character is haunted by his childhood, but he’s also dealing with the fact that he’s gay, [or, I later confirm, bisexual. The main character Marcello of Alberto Moravia’s novel is attracted to another women during the story.]

RB: You’re not the first person to pick up on that, but what it is that Keith wants from Sandy is so ineffable. It only exists on this emotional level—why he has to keep going into this guy’s apartment, why he thinks that this is a safe place for him. You don’t get the sense that he enjoys Sandy’s company and seeks him out. Every encounter with Sandy is just one subtle rejection after another. It’s not like he’s invited in, but for some reason he’s picked this apartment as the only safe place that he has to go, the closest thing he has to a safe place. When he’s in there, it ends up amounting to a series of weird, longing gazes that he passes on to the guy. He’s just sort of staring at him longingly, looking for something. There is a kind of homoerotic charge in that, in this man looking at this other man longingly, but it’s deeper than something sexual.

SM: It also made me wonder about, in juxtaposition, the relationship that he has with Laura. I felt like of all the relationships in the film, that to me was the most nebulous. Granted, she’s the only character of the opposite sex, so it would be the most nebulous relationship.

RB: So I’ve explored what (Keith’s) relationship would be like with his roommate. I’m trying to explore what his relationship would be like with this cheap stand-in of a best friend. Then it got to the point where—almost in a clichéd way—what would be the closest thing to a love interest? The character was formed from that point-of-view. What women, or girl in this case, would submit to his presence and why?

In the six months of character preparation work before shooting, I had these two characters Keith and Laura meet online. They met through AOL and formed a chatting rapport and e-mail rapport. When you’re dealing with a relationship that exists solely on the Internet, both sides can project onto the other. Given that she’s this insecure 16-year-old, and he’s this 26-year-old man, that was enough for her to overlook what might be an obvious inability to relate that you would instantly feel if you were spending time with the person in-person. That rapport got built over several months until they met, and as soon as they met, that relationship just fell apart. The relationship just decimated. They just realized that they had almost nothing in common with one another, and they were both just petrified. That was where the movie starts. It starts at that point where the relationship has been cemented on the Internet, but it’s just about to die.

SM: I have a very tenuous relationship with this term, and the term is ‘non-professional.’ Essentially, the only one who is trained in the cast of Frownland is Mary Wall. As a filmmaker, what is your relationship with that term?

RB: In terms of acting?

SM: Yeah, I always feel that when you talk about non-professional, in cinema history, it can only bring two ideas to mind: you’re either getting a romantic harkening to Italian Neo-Realism, which is the positive side of the term—

RB: That’s what I’m drawing from for certain. (Roberto Rossellini) is like a god. Look, all of these terms ‘non-professional,’ or even the word ‘improv,’ they foment a lot of wrong impressions. You lose control of what you’re trying to communicate by using terms like that. In terms of filmmaking, I’m interested in behaviorism. I’m interested in capturing nuanced inflection. I’m interested in people; I’m not so much interested in stories, or rather whatever stories unfold, they come from the people. I’m interested in making films that are really nothing more than just sort of a composite of behavioral gestures. So, when it comes to finding people to play parts, I’m really just looking for raw personality. You run into people ever once in a while, and you’re totally bowled over by how their brains work, by how they communicate, by how they form sentences, by how they think, by how they function. Those are the people who inspire me to want to work. Obviously, not everybody has it in them to be comfortable and let these things out naturally in front of a camera, but it’s the people who have that mix of extremely strong, raw personality mixed with a lack of self-consciousness that attract me. Those are the people that I want to work with.

SM: With this idea of focusing on people’s behaviors,…would you consider yourself, as an artist, a humanist?

RB: I’ve read all the essays that Rossellini wrote, and he’s the world’s greatest humanist that I’ve come into contact with as an appreciator of art and ideas. The problem that I have with Frownland when I measure up the term ‘humanistic’ against the work is that I’ve fallen into a trap where I’m constantly showing antipathy; I’m showing friction; I’m showing alienation; I’m showing the way people collide and reject one another. I tried to do that in a sensitive way, and hopefully that stops me from being somebody like Todd Solondz, who just puts flies in jars and pulls their wings off. That’s anti-humanist. That’s entertainment based on cruelty. That’s entertainment based on enjoying somebody who’s been stripped of their dignity. I’m hoping that there’s an obvious difference between Frownland and that kind of work.

At the same time I think there’s a lot of room to grow on my part in terms of being able to show the same level, or a level of complexity and depth, in friendship, in love, in people who have a regard for one another. Relationships are difficult. Maintaining friendships is such a complex thing. There’s so much—ugh—psychological warfare that’s waged among people that actually do like one another. I’d be much more proud of myself in terms of where I want to grow if I can start to nail that.

I want to make humanist work, but I feel I have more room to grow, you know?

For more information visit www.frownlandinc.com.