It’s May in New York and no longer cold although it’s been raining quite a bit recently. Peter Brogna stands at the entrance of the Whole Foods Market in Union Square, looking at least from this distance a bit smug and overly intellectual. I’m here to meet my friend Nick Schwartz, however, and so refuse, as is my tendency, to feel in the least intimated. I’m promptly informed by Schwartz, a perpetual support for his artistic friends, that Brogna’s short film I Love My Suit has just secured an exhibition deal of sorts overseas. “That’s great,” I say, and though I mean it, it’s perhaps said and intended with dismissive kindness. There’s a quality quite off-putting about Brogna at first, and I remain quiet for a little bit, not entirely certain how to shake it.

It’s only later that he manages to disabuse that feeling of me, and it’s done in as rude a way as possible. He amends my pronounciation of a French director’s surname, and I, feeling the weight of that correction, promptly flick him the bird. It’s something I rarely do, and the fact that I’ve done it, the fact that he’s wrestled that base instinct out of me, tells me that he’s an interesting character and a person I wouldn’t mind knowing better.

We start therefore by talking about his short film. “I Love My Suit was the first big thing that I did. I had nothing to base it on, and in a way that really helped the momentum,” he says. “We were all inexperienced, and I got lucky that (Paul Swinnerton), the actor, and the (Director of Photography Carlos Leitao) really liked the project because we were working 18-hour days, going over schedule, and they maintained their spirits. So, in that sense, while we were actually making it, I realized that you have to have and be surrounded by good people that support you.

“The other thing I learned is always to have lots of food on you. I remember my DP was getting a little cranky, and I knew he liked corn muffins. Luckily, I had one in my pocket and was able to give him one. He smiled and then we proceeded as we had. But, that’s a general rule I’ve carried into life now. I always carry little snack on me.”

Progressively as I talk with Brogna I’m able to see past my first impression of the smug intellectual. That’s not to say Brogna isn’t intellectual. He’s too much of one perhaps at times, spouting off at random moments both filmographies and well-worded critiques. It’s just to say that he actually earns the term and doesn’t claim it unjustly to seem fashionable. As for seeming smug, Brogna quickly enough reveals a flipside, that in fact, at times he’s almost a bit shy.

It’s this side of himself that manifests in I Love My Suit. Crafted as a silent short, the story follows in three distinct acts the simply named Man in Suit as he traverses the emotional path from elation to depression. Perhaps overly proud of his seersucker suit, Man in Suit hits a roadblock when the seductive Woman in Black accidentally ruins his prized possession by spilling grape juice all over it. On the one hand, while the short is outwardly absurd, it’s quite a serious statement about wanting or needing that one element in life that gives everything meaning.

“There’s a certain style to I Love My Suit that I feel is accessible on the surface, and it can remain like that. People always ask me, “Oh, what does it mean? What does it mean?” In many ways, I never really thought about it,” Brogna says.

Brogna was conscious however of all the other details of the film, even the fact that in paying homage to silent film that he was treading difficult territory. “There’s a fine line between archetype and cliché, and hopefully I didn’t cross it too much,” he says.

While preparing his new film, Brogna shares here ideas about his scripting process, the importance of locations and his ideals for filmmaking in the future.

SM: How did you go about scripting—because so much of the short was silent? How did you go about writing the action?

PB: I wrote the treatment, which is kind of like a short story, and then I wrote the script for logistics, so that we would know what scene we should be doing. But, I think what really helped the actors was that I’d written it as a complete story, just as a means to know where you are in the story, just to give some direction.

It’s a stylized acting approach. I remember in the first rehearsals, Paul would make a gesture. It’s in the movie; it’s where she says that she doesn’t have a light for her cigarette, and he makes a really broad gesture. It works in the movie, but I think I was taken aback at first. Then I realized that since he’s not saying anything that he’d have to rely on his body to do a lot. It’s great to have an actor like Paul because he has such a strong physical presence, and that’s why I wind up framing most of the movie with a 40mm lens. Apart from all the zooms, it’s pretty much just a 40mm prime lens, and I liked it because it kept the backgrounds in focus, and you could see more of his body. There are not that many close-ups, but I liked what he was doing. I felt that the performance when he’s wearing the suit, his posture is nice, and that deterioation, along with his wardrobe, is parrelled by his posture and his hair. So, we just worked a lot of the physicality, not just in the script but in the style of the acting…

SM: How did the costuming and production design processes go? You were working with Maria de Souza and Joe Eisner, right?

PB: Basically for his apartment, I just wanted it to be a really barren setting like it was for the guy in Diary of a Country Priest.. That’s what I was thinking of. The guy in Diary of a Country Priest. has kind of a cool sweater, and I felt like the seersucker suit would be my version of the priest’s sweater. But, I just wanted the apartment to be really bare. He’d have just a small studio apartment, white walls and, I guess, it’s a sheet on the wall. I don’t even really know the motivation for it apart from just the idea, and it seemed to work, that it’s something the character would put up on his wall as if it were his version of a painting. It’s like he’s so out of the loop with how everybody else lives that he just puts up a strange fabric like that. Other than that most of it is locations, and that movie has a lot of locations…I’d just pick locations that I aesthetically liked and that you don’t have to dress—the restaurant, the suit store and the dry cleaners. Especially with the dry cleaner, which was just a static shot, it has, I think, a lot of character. We wanted a dry cleaner that actually does the dry cleaning on premise so you’d be able to see a ton of clothes in the background.

The costume design in a way was simple. He’s got two costumes. He’s either in the suit or in his underwear. The seersucker suit was pretty standard. We ended up going with a gray-stripped seersucker suit as opposed to a blue one. We thought myabe the contrast would work better for black-and-white. The tie, which I don’t ever think you ever really get to see too well unless it’s on a big screen, it’s turtles on his tie, which he is in his shell a lot. That’s kind of an obvious thing if you know it’s there. Also, his shoes are like alligator shoes, which I thought was pretty unique. It wound up working perfectly, but we’d just grabbed those shoes as an option. Paul, the first time he put them on, said they were really comfortable, and they were cheap—like 10 dollars new—so they were really bad quality, but he thought they were really comfortable.

SM: Talking about the locations, which you’d mentioned just a little earlier, and I believe you’ve said this before if not directly to me but in another interview I’ve read, that you were really concerned with showing New York as it’s not normally seen.

PB: I wanted to try to avoid the postcard settings. There’s a park scene, and if you’re going to have a park scene, the most obvious thing to do would be Central Park. It’s just innately photogenic, but I always liked that park on the Upper East Side, the Carl Schurz Park, which is on 86th and the East End. I’ve always felt like it had a lot of character, and I didn’t see it enough in movies. I think there’s a shot in Hitch where the Allegra character lives on 86th and the East End, and you can see the entrance to the park there. I remember watching that movie and being so excited to see the park in a movie.

They have great, big benches there. For the most part the benches in Central Park are long, and they are broken up. It’s like a long series of benches, and they have the handrails in the middle so you can sit two people in there. I wanted a bench that would have a lot of space. When I scouted in Central Park, and thought, “Maybe I should shot Central Park,” it just didn’t have that. Then I just said, “You know, I really want to shot it on the Upper East Side,” and this is perfect. It’s got these great big benches, so she can choose to sit further away from him than she does whereas if she choose to sit near him on the Central Park bench, she would be immediately right next to him by virtue of the fact that the benches are smaller.

You could say a lot more about the character that she had a lot more room to sit and chose to sit that close to him. She’s got dialogue, but most of the information we learn about her is based through her actions.

SM: I was hoping you could tell me how you went about writing the particular dialogue for the title cards. For her character, and you’ve said before that her dialogue isn’t indicative of what she actually means, it is the only thing that we directly know about her.

PB: You feel like you learn about her through the dialogue?

SM: Well…

PB: I didn’t mean to say that the dialogue isn’t important because I wanted it to add a little flavor. I like that she says, “I always wanted to learn how to draw,” because I remember when I was a kid I used to draw, and I guess it was a source for attention. You’d sketch, and people would come over and look at what you’re drawing. Occasionally, just once in a while, someone would come over and ask, “Can you teach me how to draw?” I just started to draw on my own, so I never really learned persay, but I thought that was something interesting about her, that she didn’t have it innately but that it’s something she would like to do. That’s always something endearing to me that somebody would say something like that.

SM: At the same time it’s really intimate, so the line obviously has a lot of subtext. I wasn’t even sure that she wanted to learn how to draw so much as she just wanted to know what he was doing.

PB: Yeah, she just kind of walks into frame while he’s drawing. I like that you could imagine that she was just passing by, saw somebody drawing and the fact that she always wanted to draw, that would be something that would attract her to him.

SM: I know you’ve said there is a love story element to that second segment of the film with her. Was the intimation of the love story intentional or just happenstance?

PB: They’re both just outsiders and that in a perfect world, they would be a great couple. You only see her in that one scene, and I don’t know if that was the idea of mine that she be called ‘Woman in Black,’ and she would just always wear black. Then here’s this guy who always wears a seersucker suit. So, in pretty much every way they are just total opposites. She smokes; he doesn’t. He draws; she doesn’t. She has dark skin; he’s very pale. She’s got black hair; he’s blond. I like them as foils in the dramatic structure, to use the extremes, the opposites attract kind of thing. It was definitely an intention of mine for the story to seem like they might get together. For whatever reason, he’s very closed off, and she’s able to get through his walls a little bit. Even when she’s trying to get this eyelash off his face, he just sits there. If he really wanted her not to touch him, he could just have gotten up and walked away. But, he just stands there and tries to fight her off. That’s something I’ve always thought about. If somebody says something to you, and you’re rude to them, then they go away, and you kind of miss them a little bit even though your behavior is dictating that to happen. But, you miss them, and so I kind of felt that he still wanted her around, and that’s why he didn’t get up.

While I say that they’d be the ideal couple, I think that from the get-go the cards are stacked against them. It’s like a Greek tragedy. She’s there with the grape juice, and that’s the situation in which they are going to meet. It’s the timing, everything. The fact that they meet when she’s got the grape juice is just saying, “Well, it’s a tragedy.”

SM: Do you feel like that’s indicative of the human experience, just particularly regarding romantic relationships? Just that for some reason you have the cards stacked against you in that manner?

PB: Timing is the most important thing. It’s the one thing that you can’t fake. I certainly don’t believe that in life there’s only one person for everyone, but I think that what happens is you could end up with a variety of people, and the timing dictates it. I met a girl when I was fourteen, and it didn’t work out for whatever reason. If I had met her when I was thirty, same person and the timing was right, I would totally have worked out. I could have married her and spent the rest of my life with her. So, I don’t like to think of it so much that the cards are stacked against you as much as you’re a victim to the timing and the circumstance. That could be stacked against you or work for you.

You see beautiful women with nerdy guys every once in a while, and maybe that’s because the beautiful woman spent her whole life dating shallow guys and just been burnt out. Then she meets this guys who’s kind of nerdy and insecure but really sweet, and she’s burnt out by the other guys, and the timing was just right when they met. Had they met ten years before that, she wouldn’t have given him the time of day. Or vice versa.

SM: I don’t want to put too much undue weight on this second section because it’ll come across as if I’m imposing some sort of thematic meaning above that of the other two sections. So, we have this break in the second section, where he encounters this possibility of a connection, that for some reason the timing isn’t right, and then we spiral into the manic state of the third segment of the film. We find out that there are no more seersucker suits in all the world, and so he can’t find a replacement for his suit. That then spirals into this idea of “Who is he?” now that he no longer has the object which has always defined who he’s been. So, I was hoping that you could talk a bit about the theme of not necessarily knowing yourself when all that you’ve had and all that you’ve defined yourself by is taken away from you.

PB: Did you ever see that John Lennon documentary Imagine?

SM: No, I haven’t seen it.

PB: I think it’s Andrew Solt, that’s the director, but there’s this scene where John Lennon is in The New York Times office with the writer. She’s very New York intellectual, like you just look at her and think, “Wow. She works for The New York Times.” Just everything about her. And, Lennon’s on one of his activist speils, and he says, “If I can just save one life…,” and she stops him and says, “You don’t think you’re saving lives, do you?” Then he says, “Well, I’m sorry I don’t sing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ anymore. I’ve grown up.” And, she says, “Have you? Have you?” But, that woman, I found out, because I always remembered that scene in the movie, I always really liked it, she was a writer, and I think she developed Parkinson’s later in her life, and she killed herself. I kind of understand that, especially if you struggle throughout life, and you have that one thing that drives you, and you lose that, that’s everything for you. Going to the extreme like she ended up killing herself, and this guy ends up killing himself to take it to the dramatic extreme for the purposes of the storytelling, I understand that.

This character, he just goes from restaurant to work; he doesn’t have a lot going on, but he’s got this suit that just keeps him going. Just dramatically I find that compelling, that person that just has one thing to keep them going and going. And, I think that’s the challenge in life, to try to find a couple of things, or something that’s not so solipsistic. Like a John Lennon had a family—it’s the song ‘Watching the Wheels.’ You know that song ‘Watching the Wheels Go By’? It’s a John Lennon song, and it’s pretty much about people saying, “Oh, you’re not doing a lot of music anymore. You must be depressed. And, he’s just saying, ‘Well, I’m sitting here watching the wheels go by.’” He’s happy with his life. He’s been able to get multiple things going on, and that was the key to his optimism. If he just had music, it wouldn’t be enough.

SM: I’m going to make the leap, the assumption that filmmaking is one of those things for you, a thing that keeps you grounded without grounding you down. Would you say that’s the case, and what other things do that for you?

PB: In a way that’s my sole ambition, and everything is centered around that. But, I would hope that I would get to a point in my life where I could make movies professionally and still have a life, a family and people I cared about. Right now I’d say that movies are a big point in my life and trying to make them, and I aspire to use that as a means to a better life, having friends. I definitely don’t anticipate being as focused on it as I am now as later.

That’s kind of what I like about Woody Allen. I think he’s great, certainly one of the greatest American directors ever, but it seems like in his later movies, maybe starting with Manhattan Murder Mystery, there’s definitely an effortlessness to them. It seems like he’s happy in his personal life. Maybe I’m just projecting or reading into them, and he’s so good about what he does that there’s that effortlessness to the movies that I find really incredible. I know that a lot of people knock his later movies, but The Curse of the Jade Scorpion I think is a real masterpiece. It’s not pretentious. It’s not ambitious in a superficial sense like a Radio Days that tries to do everything. I think it’s a wonderful movie, but it’s such an ambitious movie on the surface. He’s taking on a whole period, showing the highs of everybody in the family listening to the radio and also the lows when the little girl Polly dies in the well. It’s just covering all the highs and lows of this period.

Now, he’s just making these kind of upbeat movies, and maybe I’m projecting onto these. I just find it so enjoyable that he seems centered in his life, making movies is his job and he loves doing it. I’ve always heard stories that if he wanted to watch a baseball game, he’d wrap early, go home and watch the baseball game, and I like that. I’ve worked on movies too where, if you take it too seriously, I feel like the director seems bogged down and loses sight. Especially if you’re working with a lot of people on your crew, I feel like your level of compassion is really pivotal, and the director sets that tone. It’s always much better if that person is a good person and can attach enough in their life that they don’t take it so seriously for a while. I think it’s important to take it seriously now but later on to aspire to be able to do it professionally and still have room that it doesn’t take up all your energy doing it.

SM: Working 18-hour days on I Love My Suit I’m assuming you didn’t have that luxury yet, but what was that like?

PB: Well, that was actually fun because I’m still at that beginning level where this is everything you do, and I finally got to do it. To have people around me who were as dedicated as I am, that was really inspiring. It also wasn’t cutthroat. Everybody who worked on that movie, I met for that movie. I grew up making shorts with my friends and spending all my energy convincing my friends to help me out. That took a lot out of me, and I had a bad experience a year or two before I Love My Suit in trying to make a short, with my friends just letting me down because they weren’t as committed as I was. So I had to be surrounded by people who were committed and eager just like me starting out, trying to get experience, and so that was fun.

There’s something to be said for being single and young and not having children, but I think if you’re married, have a bunch of kids and are working 18 hours a day that there’s something wrong with that, that your priorities are askew. Ultimately life is more important than movies, but up until I have a real life, I can afford the luxury of working on a movie and enjoying it for that long.

For more information visit www.ilovemysuit.com.

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