Aaron Katz & Sarah Hellman on the set of Quiet City

A conversation wherein Aaron Katz talks about the small steps and collaborations on Quiet City.

SM: In interviews you give great statements about these folks, [Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati and Preston Sturges, among others] that you respect. In talking with indieWIRE about Quiet City, you said of Syndromes and a Century that the film was overwhelming but silently humanist. Then a year before that you’d talked about the work of British naturalist Gerald Durrell, and this was the quote, which I thought was so wonderful, “It presented a world that was full of amazing things, not somewhere exotic and far away but wherever you were at the moment.” I was thinking about how appropriate these two statements were taken out of context and applied to Quiet City. That’s exactly what that film is about for me.

The film is about all these little amazing moments between these two people, and I think it can be very difficult to make a film about that. You did it with a lot of grace. How did you do that? I know it’s a big question, but how did you make that space--that realistic, lyrical and beautiful space—out of very tiny moments?

AK: What I said about Gerald Durrell—I didn’t think about these sort of bigger meanings when I said it. I meant it just about him, but I think it’s something I do believe about life and about movies. The most exciting things are those that present something that you can get in touch with, and it’s not distant and far away and that you can’t be a part of. It is something that’s close.

With Quiet City I guess a lot of it has to do with the people on the crew and in the cast. Most of us were friends and those who weren’t friends before became friends during. We all stayed at the producer’s apartment, and it did have an effect on things and allowed us to do something small, allowed us all to be speaking the same language. Then the fact that we didn’t have a lot of time and money I think is something that worked to our benefit in that we were then forced to rely on our first instincts and react to what the surroundings were—what people were around, where we were shooting. Instead of trying to fit the time and place to something in the script—we did have a script but—we oftentimes fit the script to the people, the time and the place. If the movie is successful in creating an intimate environment then that’s why.

SM: I know you’d written this very quickly. What was it a month from beginning to end?

AK: Initially I wrote the first draft in maybe just a little more than a week. I wrote 10 or 15 pages a day…For me the best writing comes out of writing quickly, but it’s also hard to do that because I start to reconsider things, start to wonder. That’s where I go off the tracks. So I tried to make rules to force myself to write quickly and instinctually. Then once that was done, it was probably a month worth of revising and late nights over at (producers Brendan McFadden and Ben Stambler’s) place talking about it and playing cards in between.

SM: Is that ever scary, working that rapidly and then being worried in the interim, “Am I going to be able to do this rush of writing again?”

AK: Are you asking if I’m worried that it won’t work out or that, because it’s so based on chance and inspiration, the inspiration won’t hit?

SM: That the inspiration won’t hit.

AK: That’s a fitting question. I’m working on writing something right now that I also wrote fairly quickly, not quite as quickly as Quiet City, but over a time of about three weeks. I probably finished that draft about a month and a half ago, and I really, really want to and need to revise it. After I get off the phone with you, I’m determined to sort of lock myself in my room here and work on it.

It’s the kind of thing where I am worried. I’m excited about the script, but it’s not quite where I want it to be…I don’t work with note cards, and there isn’t a trudge through it sort of process. It often is just a happening on the spur of the moment, so the scary thing is, like you said, that you can’t control that necessarily.

SM: This is the piece that’s set in the 1970s between the jazz musician and the country boy?

AK: Yeah.

SM: Unlike Dance Party USA and Quiet City, you’re working in a time period with this. Has this history bogged you down at all? How are you dealing with that?

AK: When I wrote it initially, I didn’t do any research. I set it in a time and place that I don’t really know that much about, so that’s one of the things that’s making it hard to go back because I want it to be accurate. But, ultimately the film is about friendship, and the reason it’s set in that time period is that the main character is a jazz guy, and I like the idea of it being close to when really, really exciting things were going on even in mainstream jazz in the 60s but just far enough way that it was out of his reach; whereas now it’s so far out of reach that it seems like a non-issue. In this case, he’s just a couple of years away from it. So, that’s why I wanted to set it then, but setting it then does create problems. Obviously there’s the race issue that is still relevant today but was especially then with the Civil Rights Movement going on in the previous decade. The script’s not about that at all, but I want to make sure to get those things right because it could be a sensitive subject.

SM: I know you’re from an acting background, and working from that, I expected in Quiet City to see markers of the theatrical. What I noticed by and large was not that but really a sense of poetry instead. To me, all of Quiet City felt like, and I’m sure you’ve heard this before, a visual poem…The poem ebbs and flows on the landscape shots, and so it’s as if those are the chorus or repetitive stanzas of the poem.

How do you look at film? Do you look at film as being like a visual poem? When you approach it, how do you visualize it?

AK: I wouldn’t necessarily use those words ‘visual poem,’ but I try, whether it’s something I know well, like the world of Quiet City or a bit less the world of Dance Party,…to capture human interactions and also interactions with the world in a truthful way. By truthful I don’t necessarily mean 100 percent realistic or naturalistic. It might be impressions, and so in Quiet City those static shots of the city are our way, myself and Andy Reed, the (Director of Photography), our way of capturing how it feels to be in Brooklyn and capturing that spirit at its best. You know those days sometimes when you really feel like you’re in touch with where you are and things feel good and you sort of feel like you understand the place that you live in? That was our way of trying to capture that feeling.

SM: There’s a mysticism sometimes to understanding where you’re at. That’s not to say that you can’t try to explain the feeling, but there’s always something intangible underneath it. So, it seems to be sometimes that photography or film is much more honest to the spirit of that mystery than trying to describe it in words.

AK: Yeah, I have a hard time describing it in words, and I get very nostalgic for places I live even while I’m still living in them. I feel like that feeling is also something you can’t control. I can’t make myself have that feeling. Just some days I’m walking along, and I get that feeling. Some days I just trudge, trudge to the subway and don’t even notice anything.

SM: Do you feel that you get nostalgic for these places even when you’re living there because you realize that at some point you have to leave?

AK: Definitely.

SM: It’s weird to be projecting that much, isn’t it?

AK: Nostalgia in advance is dangerous because it makes it hard to live in the moment. Sometimes I find that I can live in the moment and don’t think about other things, but sometimes, if something fun is happening, I’m already thinking how it’s going to be over soon, and I’ll be looking back on it, never to be experienced again. It’s not a great feeling and one I wish I could avoid.

SM: Talking about nostalgia—this is an off-shoot—but I know nothing about Portland. I think you need to tell me a little bit about Portland. [Editor’s Note: Portland is Katz’s home base, and he begins to ramble excitedly, stopping himself finally in a conclusion that he’s not saying anything helpful. I ask him after this what his childhood in the city was like. That’s where the following answer begins.]

AK: Being very young, my memories were not so much of Portland but of my neighborhood, which seemed like the whole world. I lived in part of Portland actually that used to be a very inexpensive part of Portland that now has been gentrified. There’s not a Whole Foods, but there’s a New Seasons, which is a local chain that’s similar. About a block from my house there was this abandoned school called Kennedy School, and it was just totally empty, abandoned and falling apart, this old, beautiful, crumbling building. Now, this local pub chain Mc Menamins bought it and fixed it up, so now it’s this super nice, cool place to hang out. So, my neighborhood where I grew up has really significantly changed, but I wasn’t necessarily aware of Portland as a whole when I was very young.

Then in high school my memories are of really specific places. There are a million restaurants in any city, but of course, you always find the few, and there was this place called Dot’s. I didn’t smoke in high school, but many of my friends did. At Dot’s you could smoke, so we went there all the time. Of course, we were the obnoxious high school kids who would go there, get two cups of coffee out of six people, one person would get a plate of fries, spend less than 10 dollars, and we’d sit there for hours and hours and hours. I’m sure they hated us, but we loved going there.

SM: [Quiet City composer] Keegan DeWitt is a Portland friend, right? You guys have been friends since high school?

AK: We actually went to this place called Pacific Crest Community School. I can’t figure out how to describe it. There were no grades, you picked your own classes, it was sort of arts-oriented and there were less than 100 kids in the school. It’s funny, thinking of Keegan now, I can’t think of him thinking that was cool at the time, but we both did back then. But, yeah, he’s a high school friend, and we made some Super 8 films together…

SM: I loved that Super 8 idea you had in high school, and in that first indieWIRE interview, you were like, “Worst idea ever.” It was a mobster film—

AK: Oh, God. It was awful!...It’s high school students playing mob bosses, wearing ill-fitting suits that belonged to their parents. Every time a piece was taken we’d have a scene of a death. We thought we were really cool and had probably seen Reservoir Dogs too many times. It was awful. It was really bad. I get killed, but I forget how I get killed though.

SM: (laughing) It’s a weird connection because Quiet City has nothing to do with what I’m about to say, but all I kept thinking when I was watching the film was, “I really want Aaron Katz and Andrew Reed to make a thriller.”

AK: I would love to make a thriller and an action movie. I think that’d be a lot of fun.

SM: My ticket is paid for your thriller, Aaron, but Andrew has to shoot it.

AK: I know! I know!

SM: Well, the reason I brought up Keegan was because I want to talk about this amazing score. The one sequence where the score really hit me as being so accurate to the spirit of the film was in the dance sequence. I don’t know if this is an insider question or not, but what were the actors actually dancing to?

AK: Let me see if I can remember the name of the song…It’s from this series of super obscure soul and R&B songs called Stompin’. I have it on vinyl,…It’s a really fun song to dance to, and the reason they’re dancing to it is because if people are over, and it’s time to have a dance party, that’s my go-to record. We actually attempted to get the rights for that song initially. I liked the idea of them actually listening to something and dancing because in so many movies, most movies, people are just pretending to dance to a song. But, we couldn’t get the rights, and then I had the idea, “Maybe we can get a friend of ours to record something that sounded similar, a 60s R&B really fun dance type song.”

Nothing was working, and Keegan had recorded several songs for the score that I really liked but that didn’t fit in anywhere. So, all the sudden I was like, “Ach, maybe I’ll just try this Keegan song [“City”]", and now actually I like it much, much better than had we used the real song they were actually dancing to.

SM: The score in that particular piece of film makes for a really nice mystery. It also gave me the feeling, and I don’t often get this feeling in cinema, that the storytelling was from an omniscient narrator. The score keyed me into the fact that while I didn’t necessarily know what was going on in the characters’ world all the time, it didn’t matter—because what did matter was the relationship I had with the way I was seeing the world. (laughing shy) I guess that wasn’t intentional because the music came as an afterthought, but it was beautifully done. That sequence also speaks the most to me about there being an ephemeral nature of youth.

AK: We were talking about nostalgia earlier, and I don’t know if nostalgia is the right word, but watching the film now, I feel like it has something to do with these moments slipping away, that they are fragile and over time they go away. The music, even in the way we synched it up—there’s a second of them still dancing after the music ends.

SM: Yeah, I love that last, little moment after the score ends, and they’re still existing in that world…I feel like too there are lots of secrets throughout the film, and all the secrets occur in moments that we as viewers have no access to and even that the other characters have no access to either. Like the sleep sequences, there have to be secrets there, but because they’re sleeping we don’t know what those secrets are. Where did that idea of the sleep sequences come from?

AK: Those happened as I wrote. Questions like that, where things came from, I can theorize now, but almost the whole movie—not the particulars of how it’s said, all the particulars are improv'd—is structurally close to, even within scenes structurally, to how it’s written. That’s just something that seemed right at the time, but it wasn’t like I thought, “Here we need a sequence where they sleep to bridge it.” It just felt right as I was writing. It was more like a gut thing and not a ‘thinking it through’ thing.

Looking back on it now, I like what you said, that it’s secrets that they might know individually, though they wouldn’t know each others’ secrets, but that we can’t know either of their secrets. Looking back on it, I hope it feels like it contains a lot of secrets, and it’s almost like you’re hiding in nooks and corners of Brooklyn, not being totally exposed to the world-at-large.

SM: Another note, I love that monologue given by the artist [Robin, played by Sarah Hellman] where she lies on top of her friend. That is such an interesting scene for a few reasons: the first being that here’s Jaime; she come from Atlanta; she’s completely lost; is staying with this guy Charlie that she doesn’t know; and, Robin doesn’t invite her to stay at the house.

Katz laughs.

SM: It’s a strange sequence because I kept thinking, “Robin is giving this monologue with all of her heart, but I haven’t seen her react to Jaime’s situation in any tangible way.” She’s just like, “Oh, yeah, go home with this guy Charlie.” And, I love that because it feels so honest and particularly that monologue is honest to the spirit of what people are actually like.

I know you had the actress in mind early, but I don’t know how that monologue came about.

AK: That wasn’t in the script as such. The scene was there, and she tells in the script another story. Initially Sarah Hellman, who plays Robin, wasn’t super comfortable with this being told—but we’ve talked about it lately, and we did a radio interview lately where we talked about it, so I think it’s okay now—,but we got to the location, and I got everyone started setting up the equipment technically, getting all of that ready. Then Sarah and I went off into a corner and just talked about what the scene was and talked about some things that had happened to her in her own life. I wasn’t sure exactly what, but I was sure I’d know it when I heard it. She told me one story that didn’t feel quite right, and then she told me the story that she tells in the movie. It felt really right, and at the time I wasn’t sure why, but now I realize that it’s essentially giving the thesis statement of the whole movie, is that “Sometimes it’s just nice to be close to someone even if it’s only for a little bit.” Sometimes you absolutely need that. So she told me that, and I was really excited about it. She was kind of uncomfortable portraying it because she’d never acted before and sharing something from your own life like that, it’s something that’s now out in the world in a way.

We shot it twice, and the story’s actually much longer than it is on screen. One take was 20 minutes and another take was 40 minutes long, and she tells all the ins and outs of this really elaborate story. What’s on screen is just a little bit of it, but to me, it’s really the point of the movie. I hate movies that tell you what to think or tell you what the point of the movie is. I hope this is a nice way of not being too manipulative but having Sarah get to the bottom of it. So much of the movie doesn’t do that that I think it’s okay for it to happen once.

SM: And, I love that it comes from a character on the periphery of what the audience is invested in. It comes about late in the game, and so it’s hard to connect with (Robin). So what you end up connecting with is the idea she’s presenting. Like you said, it works so well for that context.

Oh, but my question off of that last moment [where Kyle is rude to Jaime] though is: Why is there a stigma put onto Jaime for working at an Applebee’s?

AK: (laughing) Erin Fisher was mad because she actually did work at not an Applebee’s but a Ruby Tuesdays. In the script it was just (Jaime’s) job, and I didn’t think too much about it. But, then when (Erin) told me that she did work at a Ruby Tuesdays, she got all embarrassed and upset about it.

Whenever people get embarrassed or upset, it makes me want to get to the bottom of it and find out more about it, and so I thought it would be interesting to do that on screen. I told (Tucker Stone) not to let that go, and Tucker, who plays Kyle, is very good at being a jerk and sniffing out people’s insecurities. So, it’s more about him sniffing out her insecurity than about her working at Applebee’s.

SM: To keep talking about Erin, I’d like to look at her performance, and one of the best moments that stands out in my mind is the nervous laughter segment in Daisy’s. That’s such an honest moment, and I kept thinking, “How the heck did she pull that off?” How do you laugh like that? How do you do that?

AK: It goes back to why I cast Erin Fisher in the first place. As I’ve said before, I wrote it with her in mind. Her character was actually in this other script I was trying to write, but (the script) got out of control—too many characters, too long, and it wasn’t good in the first place. But, Erin Fisher’s character Jaime was in it briefly as a small character, and for some reason I got interested in that character and put her in Quiet City.

The reason I had Erin Fisher in mind is because in life Erin is very in the moment. If she’s having a conversation with you, she’s really listening, really reacting and she’s not thinking about tomorrow necessarily. She’s very in tune with what’s happening and really receptive to what’s happening, and that’s just her in life. She hasn’t done that much acting before. She went for a couple of years to North Carolina School of the Arts with a bunch of the rest of us, and that was my observation of her from life. So, by casting her I hoped that she would be able to put herself in the moment and, after she got comfortable initially, not worry about what was going to happen, if she was going to have to deliver this specific thing or that specific thing, that things would happen as surprises so that she could stay in the scene.

That laughing moment comes out of, at the end of the scene—we had a shape to the scene and a progression—but when they got to the end of that, I just didn’t call cut when they were expecting it. So, they had that uncomfortable moment of “What are we going to do?” and then they snapped into talking about something—I don’t remember what it was—and it went into her laughing. The reason it feels natural is not only because of what I said but also because (Cris Lankenau) and Erin have what I think are the best qualities for improvisational actors, which is that they’re not trying to think of things that will be funny, clever or interesting. You can always see that and feel that in actors, and it starts to feel unreal. They do just pay attention to each other and react to what’s really happening. That’s where that moment and many other moments came from.

SM: To talk about Cris, where Erin’s character does live in the moment, Cris is interesting in the sense that his character Charlie is obviously living in the past, or at least others are constantly mentioning to him that he’s living in the past…What was it in Cris that told you, “Oh, wait that’s our Charlie?”

AK: What we did was not a traditional audition because I think those are not very useful, at least for my purposes in determining whether I’d be able to work well with people. One thing I had people do was to tell a story from their own life.

Cris told this story about his ex-girlfriend making chicken. His ex-girlfriend had gone to culinary school for a year sometime in the past, and she fancied herself a cooking expert. And, Cris was making chicken, and all this girl could do was criticize. Every time Cris tried to make something, this girl would criticize whatever he was making. I’m not telling it funny the way Cris was telling it. The story was amazing because it was really funny, but it wasn’t like Cris was putting it on as, “This is my stock story that I tell.” You could tell right away that it wasn’t rehearsed or planned. He was so good at communicating, like he could see exactly the moment as it was happening. We did it in a way that Erin and Cris were making eye contact, and he was really focused on talking to her.

Then we had them do this acting exercise that I think is really useful in auditions. You have the two actors look at each other and describe what they see in each other, the behavior not, ‘He’s wearing a red sweater.” Even though it’s a little silly and I question the usefulness of a lot of acting exercises, I think that one is particularly useful because it’s a fast way to tell if A) People are too in their heads or B) All about controlling the situation because you have to both describe and listen at the same time. People who are good at that exercise I find are usually people who’re good at the way I like to work. They’re very open, not too controlling and really listening. If they’re really listening too, part of the thing that they’ll start to describe in the behavior of the other person is how they’re being described.

SM: Thinking about that exercise too, it’s so important for a film like Quiet City where there’s an immediate and necessary intimacy between these two characters. We don’t know as viewers at first if it’s based on anything or if we’re just imagining it. If that trust didn’t exist between the actors, I don’t think that would work.

That’s one thing I was very aware of when I was watching the film. Erin is absolutely beautiful, and I’m empathizing more with Charlie here, but I kept thinking, “She’s giving him these big moony eyes—

Katz laughs, and it’s appropriate now to describe exactly how he does it. It’s one quick intake and outlet of breath as if you’ve caught him off guard for a second, and he’s simultaneously surprised and amused.

SM: And, what is he supposed to do? What do you do? So much of the early part of the film is predicated on that look, which is not loving but it’s full of love.

AK: That’s kind of how Erin is in life--(laughing) not giving big, moony eyes to everyone, but when you’re talking to her, she makes eye contact in a way that’s almost eerily too much. It’s because she’s actually listening and paying attention, and I think it’s only eerie because so much of the time you’re talking to people, and you realize that they’re only half listening to you.

Also, I think Erin and Cris, they throughout the movie were getting to know each other, and except for at the audition, they’d never met before. Although we didn’t shoot in sequence, we shot jumping back-and-forth a little bit, kind of as the relationship builds in the film,…but they and the whole crew grew to really love being around each other. So, some of that performance comes out of us having such a good time together. All of us.

Benten Films releases both Quiet City and Katz's feature debut Dance Party USA on DVD in January 2008. For more information on the film, visit www.quietcitymovie.com..