"I don’t actually remember this, but you know how they used to make the Star Wars toys? I guess they still make them, but they’re not as cool now," he starts. "I used to set them up and make little narratives with them as a kid. Photograph them and make little stories. So, it’s really the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do and probably the only real interest I have in a way."

This is Jeremy Phillips. "I care about it passionately, the medium," he says. That medium, of course, being film. A University of Southern California graduate, Phillips worked with Naveen Singh on the short 27,000 Days, helping his do-it-all filmmaking friend hone his vision of the experimental narrative during the editing process.

"My greatest contributions weren’t necessarily in the cut, but (Naveen) would call me in the middle of the night, because we both stay up late, and we’d talk on the phone for hours about movies, about what this movie was about and about what he was trying to accomplish. My greatest contribution to it was just being his friend essentially," Phillips says.

A nonlinear story about a man dealing with the decline of his memory, the film lent itself to a certain playfulness of structure, and as much as could be scripted, as much too had to be built in the box itself. Here Phillips talks about that process, the difficulties along the way and the importance of Stan Brakhage.

SM: It seems to me that the challenge of what you had to do was to be so coherent with the editing that the main character was allowed to be incoherent.

JP: That was kind of the notion, to have all the cuts make an intuitive or emotional sense for the character, not always literal. The progressions weren’t apparent at first as to where it was going but emotionally they were sound and drew you into his mind. The editing was—and, I hate to use these words, and I know (director Naveen Singh) will just be rolling his eyes—this impressionistic take on the decay of a mind.

SM: Where did you guys begin with the piece?

JP: The first few cuts were literally script cuts. As with any movie, you cut to the script, and hopefully it’ll find its own voice along the way. So, it was a lot of trial and error, seeing what was cool, what was not cool and what was too contemporary. One of the ideas that Naveen wanted was that the film would have only devices that were used in 60s films.

Naveen and I are close friends, and we have similar tastes. We’re both really interested in the 50s and 60s American experimental filmmakers. Bruce Connor comes to mind and Stan Brakhage. And, so Naveen didn’t want to do any “digital trickery.” If it could have happened in the 1960s on a flatbed, then it was okay for the film. If it couldn’t have been done that way, then we couldn’t do that. That was one of the rules.

I always felt like the film came from a different era in a sense. Ultimately, I think it’s kind of timeless in a way because it’s not only referencing cinema from the past, it’s of the moment, it’s about things that are concerning Naveen in the present. I wish that more movies were like that now. Just as a moviegoer, I get bored with all the movies, and I wish more stuff was like that and took more risks.

SM: In terms of the riskiness and challenge, were there particular sequences of the short that were harder to wrangle in than others?

JP: For Naveen, I think the ending was difficult for him to judge the length of how long that decay should go on—the really quick cutting, it’s all quickly cut, but near the end how long that should go on; when it became abrasive; how much information needed to be mixed in with the barrage of images; how much information the audience was receiving; and, what a barrage of images meant in terms of new information because it’s all very imagistic in a way up until that point. So, that was particularly challenging.

The opening was difficult too…You want to seduce the audience into the film, and how do you do that?

SM: I’m glad you talk about the barrage of images because particularly at the beginning and end, we’re getting those homage sequences to Stan Brakhage, which I’m assuming it must have been hard to say, “When is this too much?”

JP: Exactly!

(Naveen) and I love watching that…After Stan Brakhage died, (the Egyptian) had this really cool screening of his work in memoriam. We went, and this guy, seriously, up front had a heart attack during Window Water Baby Moving. It’s a silent movie obviously, but a guy stood up and said, “Is there a doctor in the house?” because it’s so intense. (almost as an aside) The guy was okay by the way.

I really enjoy (Brakhage’s work). I think it’s beautiful, and I enjoy a lot of contemporary art too. Looking at that, for me, is totally entertaining. I probably could have watched more of it frankly in terms of Naveen’s film, but I don’t think he wanted to be too self-indulgent about it, and he ultimately made the right decision. It was a matter of, to answer your question more directly, of balancing self-indulgence with how it was relevant to the narrative.

SM: In terms of the technical side of editing, how long did the process take, and how did you co-edit over that time?

JP: I worked on it at the beginning, and Naveen took it over at the end. I think it took two years, but I don’t really know. It seemed to take forever.

Naveen cut more of it that I did because he took over at a certain point, and I went off to write. Then I’d watch it periodically, and we’d talk about it at length. I feel that it is Naveen’s film, and I was just there to talk to him.

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