During the Independent Film Festival of Boston, the three sat down for a late lunch in between screenings and here share their thoughts about their energetic and organic collaboration, the creation of Cinebonics and the importance of experimentation.

SM: Right now I’m reading Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and she references one particular philosopher—whose name I’m forgetting right now; forgive me—and his interpretation of the statement, “Love conquers all.” She explains the thought that the word ‘conquer’ itself is immediately aggressive, that it is more in line with the word ‘destroy.’ And, so the quote reads more like, “Love destroys all,” both good and bad for this philosopher. As I watched the film, that’s what came most to mind for me, this idea that love has the capacity to burden with all this angst, and I think that’s well seen in the ending scene in which Cara says, “I just don’t know if all the good moments outweigh all the bad moments.”

At the time you made the film, you all had been dealing with recent break-ups, and so since it’s a bit close to home for you all, I was hoping you could respond to that “Love conquers all,” idea and then particularly where that one scene came from.

Michael: Originally when we started writing the script we had these two ideas of the way that the movie would end. In that scene right before the end where [David’s] talking about how he wants them to get back together, and then he leaves the room and you see [Cara’s] facial expression and her face changes, there was the possibility there that she’s been thinking about this and wanting to be manipulative in the way. The first girlfriend affected him so much that she wants that; she wants that feeling; she wants him to remember her; she wants to feel him remembering her. So she’s creating a moment that’s memorable for that reason. Or, it’s the idea that she then figures out what she’s gotten herself into. Those were the two choices, and so in a way of diverting from making a choice, we constructed this final sequence where it went through the entire relationship in one shot. So, the whole relationship becomes destructive through this one shot.

But, I think that when she talks about how she’s not sure, it’s like she’s sure that she wants this to happen, this destruction, but she doesn’t know what she wants to happen after that. Very much the movie has to do with what happens in the current time as opposed to in the later times, even in the structure.

Alex: In a certain other way, it’s also about the iterations that relationships take. There’s that whole scene about how relationships in and of themselves are sort of a practice. One of the ideas behind the entire movie that we’ve talked about is it being like the oldest love story. It’s the love story that happens before the one that actually matters, or the one that actually works out would be the more appropriate way of saying it.

One of the ideas that we were constantly trying to work in is that there’s an inertia to a relationship, and in that inertia as obstacles and guilt and all sorts of small inner conflicts start to build up and impede the way that you two relate to one another, eventually in that way, like we were saying, they’re a practice. Each iteration you’re supposed to be getting better and better at it and focusing the idea of what you want. It’s the idea that love is as much a process as about timing. Someone that you’re working these issues out with now, by the point that you reach the break-up, by the point that you’ve given that much, there are so few ways that that can continue that you kind of have to start afresh. You have to start with somebody else, go back to zero and see if what you’ve learned from the past—

Paul: But can you ever actually go back there? The movie starts with David’s relationship with Shaina, and that’s a really quick relationship that deeply affects him. Then he moves on and gets with Cara, and that lasts for a long time. It’s just as important a relationship. There’s even that montage we do, “Do you ever miss Shaina?”

As much as you can go back to zero, you can’t ever really. You can’t reset.

Alex: That’s like reliving the last relationship; that’s like the last shot.

Paul: The entire relationship with Shaina has molded his relationship with Cara. If you think about it, what’s his next relationship going to be? What’s her next relationship going to be? You can never reset.

Michael: I’m confused about how we get back to the question.

SM: In a certain sense, if you can never reset, than love does destroy all. It does destroy all of the good and all of the bad. All it does is become a capsule by which you can understand all other relationships. So, in that sense, I suppose, it’s the seed of something new, but it’s not lasting in any other manner.

Alex: It’s a constantly focusing framework.

SM: I’m glad you brought us through the chronology of David’s relationships. That’s one area structurally that you all were very cool about, leaving that space for the audience to conceive of and understand their own exposition.To a certain extent, I was a bit confused about timelines, but then it was also nice because after a time I would catch up with the story.

Can you talk a bit about working with the exposition and why you guys made the very conscious choice to give the viewer that space?

Michael: …There’s really only one path. Because there are [story] lines floating here and there, you have to follow it really carefully. The idea of having it be convulted is that it’s kind of like memory. They’re jumbled up, and they pop up when you want them to and when you don’t want them to. The interpretation is kind of like if I were to tell you about my life, and I told it through a course of time—so, if we hung out for a month, and I told you pieces of my life—but because you didn’t live it, you can’t exactly make the connections, and so you saw it the way you wanted to.

Alex: The other thing we were working with when we originally started was the idea of snapshots of relationships and not just in film but also in life. There seems to be a skeletal structure for how relationships work or the arc that they take. We were thinking that, “Whoever is going to relate to the movie is going to have that innate knowledge.” We didn’t need the broad strokes to pull everybody through every moment, so if we focused on things that we found much more symptomatic—although that’s a negative, clinical world—much more emblematic of how a relationship works, then people are going to internalize it.

SM: Along the lines of the exposition question, what helped me out quite a bit were the blink sequences of black. I call them blink sequences because I was able to close my eyes for a second and think about the last scene I’d watched. How did that decision come about in editing to include these long breaks of black?

Paul: If you can relate to the movie and get into the movie, it can be kind of intense or have a claustrophobic feeling; you’re just with these two people for an hour and a half. So, it was to give people a break but also to make time pass, to separate the moments. It’s a two-year relationship, and we didn’t feel we could encapsulate those moments and separate them and make them feel like they were at different times if we didn’t use the black.

SM: The one scene that I was really drawn to but that also threw me off the chronology a bit was the scene with David and Cara lighting matches. [The two light matches at the same time, the idea being that whoever’s light goes out first has to answer the other’s question or demand about the relationship. David wants to know, “Why?”—why break-up, why didn’t it work— while Cara wants to leave the relationship on the higher ground without the explanations.] His light actually starts to go out first, but by the end of the film, Cara still gives him the answer to the, “Why?”…I want to say that scene has a Waiting for Godot feel—

Michael: You said the magic words. It’s like stepping into Waiting for Godot; you set the characters outside the story, and you put them in this negative space. There are just these objects on the table, no background, nothing really going on.

To us [David and Cara] are talking about the previous scene; they’re talking about Shaina and his previous relationship, the way it ended, the way she interpreted it and the way he interpreted it.

It’s funny you said his match goes out first because it’s actually not true. Before either of the flames goes out, it cuts.

SM: His is definitely smaller though.

Alex: It’s going.

Michael: It’s not out though.

So it’s this idea of an abstract argument, and you’ve stepped way back into their headspace. Before we go into the second act and give the whole movie over to her and change the whole dynamic of their relationship, we step back into their headspace and talk about for once and for all this previous relationship that happened to him and how it affects the two of them.

Paul: It’s as if their egos could talk to each other.

SM: I want to understand a bit more about the arguments that each makes in this scene. As I understand it, Cara’s thought is that you want to leave the relationship on the high note, that you want to leave with the good, want to leave with that punch, and his contention is: No, you want to leave knowing, “Why?” Can you explain that a bit more for me?

Michael: [David] and Shania weren’t together for very long, and she’s asking him why that hurts him so much. She thinks it’s because things were going so well, and then it just stopped. So when you leave on a high note, that’s why it hurts you so much. He says, “No,” it’s because he didn’t understand why it stopped.

The argument between [David and Shania] in front of the house isn’t really about anything, and you get the sense that it’s one of the only arguments they’ve ever had. That’s why she’s so shocked about it. So, he’s like, “I don’t understand why that would end a relationship.” That’s the truth of any short relationship. At some point somebody goes, “This actually hasn’t been going on very long. I can leave. I’m not that invested.” The other person may be much more invested, and so they don’t understand why the other person would feel like—

Done. [Cara’s] saying, “You’re upset because it ended on a high note, and you never got the chance to see it sour.” He’s saying, “It’s because I don’t understand why.” In the end, she finally gets that. That’s what that conversation is about.

Paul: But, even at the end of the film, when she tells him, “Why…” in the car, there’s that look on his face, and he goes to the train, and he’s silently sitting there, I think he’s finding out that it doesn’t even matter why. It makes no difference.

Michael: That’s actually the point I was trying to make with that first convoluted answer. It really does destroy everything, even when she tells him why, and so it really matters what happens next. She doesn’t know what happens next, but she knows she wants to destroy everything right then.

SM: Last night, as I was on a cab ride home from the screening with my friend Courtney, we were talking about these themes. Neither of us like [Mike Nichols’] Closer, but I definitely think of Natural Causes as being as harrowing as Closer. Somehow with the film you guys are able to take the harrowing nature of love but add that to—and, this made the film more interesting and compelling for me—an element of humor. I love that humor. I don’t know how in a film as emotionally gritty as this you were able to put so much of that in. How did you do that?

Paul: We’re funny guys.

Michael: That’s what happens when you hurt funny people.

Paul: Exactly. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you shouldn’t be laughing at anyone else, and we laugh a lot at other people. You have to find the humor in life, or it will kill you. And, relationships are funny—

Michael: They’re ridiculous.

Paul: You say all these things, “I’ll chase you,” and all of that, and you know, people actually have those conversations in their lives. They say trite things. When you’re looking at it, it’s pretty hilarious.

Michael: And, there’s no way that the movie’s going to hurt if you don’t find the first half of it endearing. You have to like those people.

There are things that I really like about Closer and things I don’t really like about Closer. The one thing I don’t like about it is exactly what you’re saying. It doesn’t build up these likable characters, and so when everything falls apart, which are scenes that I actually think are really well written, I don’t really care because I don’t care about the people.

SM: It’s well written, but, you’re right, there’s that sense of detachment.

And, [Natural Causes] we wrote in a month and a half. It was so personal to us; it was so close to the break-ups that it was just like we poured our hearts out onto the pages. To get away with that, and to be so overt as we are with the film, we have to do something else but that.

Paul: If you’d been there for the process, it was kind of funny. We each wrote different scenes, and, of course, we worked them together, but we each had an idea for a scene, write it and bring it to a meeting. I think if you were there, you’d have seen our different stages of ‘getting-over-it’ness. With the different scenes we were writing, one of us would come in—and, you know, when you’re getting over somebody it’s not a straight path; you feel great one day, and you feel terrible the next for no reason—and, so we’d come in one day and someone would bring in a really funny scene and somebody else would bring in this really terrible, mean, horrible scene. Then a week later it would be the opposite. It was a measure of where we were.

Michael: Then the other thing is that on set we are so crazy. We shot 20 hours a day. You have to keep people happy. We never fight, but also we had to be having fun constantly, otherwise everyone gets miserable.

We made a movie because it’s fun to make a movie, you know what I mean? We want to get our pain out; we want to make art and show it to people, but it’s also really fun to make the movie. So, we renamed everything on set. We created Cinebonics, courtesy of Michael Tully as well. All of that pours in there too. I really do believe that during the fight where [Jerzy Gwiazdowski] has that line that’s like—

Michael & Paul: “Fucking and sucking all over the tri-state area.”

Michael: That’s hilarious and painful at the same time, and I think it’s because we were joking 10 minutes before we had to shoot the most painful scene in the movie. It all just gets mixed into this jumble of emotion.

Paul: When we were shooting that there were four of us—Alex, Michael Tully, Asif [Siddiky] and me—all bent over, running backwards with the camera as [Leah Goldstein and Gwiazdowski] are walking down the street towards us, and when he goes, “Fucking and sucking all over the tri-state area,” all of us look at each other, mouths agape, trying not to laugh out loud. It was this really emotional scene, and then he said that, and we all almost lost it.

SM: Talking about the Cinebonics from before, what were some of the words and phrases?

Alex: Cinebonics was a language created entirely out of sleep deprivation. By hour 20 of any given day, one of us would be rocking backward and forward, completely exhausted—

Michael: We’re sitting in the hotel room about to shoot that scene.

Alex: And, I think Paul started it actually.

Paul: By accident.

Alex: He said, “We got mad shads up on this wall. We’ve got to blast some gold piece up in there.” Basically that meant, “There are a lot of shadows on the wall. In order to make it a nicer shot, why don’t we add something that glosses over the light so that it’s dimmer?”

Paul: Mad shads.

Alex: From there it was just lunacy. Our dolly, which was just a wheelchair, became Professor X, after the X-Men com; the bounceboard became Dr. Doom—this is also letting out a bit of our nerdy side.

Paul: Lights became gold.

Michael: Appleboxes were named in two sizes: Granny Smith and Red Delicious.

SM: Nice!

Paul: Room tone was—

Michael, Alex & Paul: Tone-lok.

Michael: When you finished shooting for the day, it’s, “Yo, MTV wraps.”

Alex: If you did a perfect take, it was called doing a Caruso.

Paul: A David Caruso.

Michael: In one and out, “Done in one.”

Paul: If you messed up, it was called a Gutenberg.

Michael: Unless it’s a tech mistake, and then it’s a Gutenborg.

Paul: Someone would walk on set, like one of our friends would be PAing, and they’d have no idea what we were talking about.

Michael: That was my favorite moment, when our friend Emma, who helped us shoot at NYU—that scene in the office where [Cara tells David] she cheated on him. She was working there, and she got us in on a weekend. So, we get in there, and Paul and Alex actually were driving upstate to shoot the pool shots because that was complicated, there was a lot of lighting everywhere, and so I’m there at NYU with Asif , Tully and the actors shooting this other scene. My phone’s off because we’re shooting, and Paul calls Emma—and, you can hear Emma’s on the phone, and she’s like, “What? What? He says, “Don’t forget to get tone-lok for the office.” What are you talking about?” It was that same thing all the time. People had no idea what we were saying.

Day one we’re shooting the hotel, and part of it is like, “This is what happens when you put a tired crew in front of a pile of food that they can’t eat.” We had all that food for that hotel scene, and that was our dinner for the night. But, we couldn’t eat it until we shot, and so we’re sitting there—

Paul: For like two hours!

Michael: Doing this—

Lerman twists one thumb over then under the other, that typical sign of impatience.

Michael: For two hours. So, we’d make all these words up, and for a day it was a joke. We were constantly laughing, but then by day three we were saying these things—

Paul: So seriously.

We need to continue the tradition next time we shoot. If we get the same crew together, we’ll know what we’re talking about.

SM: You talked a bit before about the writing process, how you’d each come in with different scenes, but how is it that you worked together?

Alex: We all went through the same exact experience at the same exact time. So Mike, Paul and I were just out at dinner one night, talking about our experiences. These are the same exact guys that whenever I’ve had a problem I go to and vice versa, I guess. So we were just there talking about our relationships, and Mike’s just like, “This is it. This is what we should do.” It was going to be a short and experimental.

Michael: Three scenes—the beginning, middle and end of a relationship. Period. Like a three-act play. Then Alex was like, “I want it to have no dialogue. Totally abstract!” And, Paul goes, “Here are some memories I have.” All the sudden we have 70 pages.

Alex: From there it was just writing and writing. I don’t even know how many pages we wrote. It was just one of those things, like, “What are you thinking? That’s awesome. Go write that.” Someone would bring something in; the other two of us would read it there, or sometimes it’d be sent in the middle of the night, and I’d just get to reading it, and by the next day someone would have reworked the lines and just passed it back out.

At this point I can’t recognize [each voice.] It’s weird. We were writing about our own relationships, we were separately at the very start, and we seemed to be writing about the same exact characters, which is really bizarre. As we worked and worked on it and threw postcards up on Mike’s wall, it just seemed to naturally focus itself.

Paul: We could totally relate to what we were each writing, and that’s how I think we could work together in rewriting. Then working with the actors felt organic. They helped create the characters definitely.

Michael: We also 110 percent feed off of each other. What’ll happen is, if one person conceptualizes something—right now we’re working on four features and two shorts simultaneously—Alex will conceptualize one thing, I’ll conceptualize another and Paul will conceptualize another, then we’ll come together to tell each other the concepts, and then we’ll be like, “Let’s shift a little bit,” but, that idea will always be the baseline. As long as we understand that and drive towards that goal, then we can just keep throwing things in there.

Alex: One of my favorite experiences was in editing. We were just working on this for months and months, and then we were like, “Oh, we need something expressionistic here, and we need Jerzy and Leah’s dialogue to come in.” So, I grab the microphone, and the two of them sit down.

Paul: I was Jerzy, Mike was Leah.

Alex: They just started talking as the characters, and for a week, that’s what we were going to work with. Then we started focusing on it from there. It’s like they were literally improv’ing scenes that later ended up making it into the movie. It’s amazing actually.

SM: Paul, you mentioned the organic nature of working with Jerzy and Leah, and I don’t want to skip over talking about those performances. How did you go about casting and working with them?

Michael: Leah’s a really old friend of mine. We’ve been friends since we were eleven. We went to theater camp together.

Paul: Same thing with Kate [MacCluggage, who plays a supporting role as the couple’s roommate Amy] right?

Michael: Kate and I went to high school together. I’d previously made movies with both of them. I made my high school senior project with Kate, and my college senior project with Leah. Ironically, the part of Cara was written for Kate, but then I got really sick when we were supposed to shot it and then she wasn’t available anymore. So, I called up Leah and said, “Hey, come here. Come bail me out,” and she came and did it, which was great and was actually how they became friends. Kate saw the movie and said, “If anyone could do this who wasn’t me, I’m so glad she did. I’m completely in love with her.”

Then Leah was like, “My boyfriend acts, and she brings Jerzy into this audition for the three of us.” They both nailed it, and we were like, “Well, we’re not doing anything else.

Paul: Shonda [Leigh Robbins], who played Shaina, is a friend of mine. I hadn’t seen her in months, and oddly I ran into her on the subway. I didn’t know she acted. She went to Emerson for acting, and I had no idea. So, I ran into her on the subway, and I said, “Oh, I’m about to do this. We’re casting for the movie this week.” She was like, “You know I act.” Then she came in, and she nailed that part. It just worked out really well.

Then once we had it cast and had written 120 pages or so, and had rewritten it a few times, then we called up the actors and had them walk the scenes out, asked them what they thought and then rewrote and remodeled.

Michael: It all happened so fast. We wrote it in a month; we went to them with a draft; and we started having rehearsals every day and every night. I worked from home, and one of them would take off two days a week during that period. We’d do daytime rehearsals and then all get together at night for another rehearsal. Through that we were still writing, so we’d do that too.

Alex: Finding locations—

Michael: All of it was like a whirlwind. I can’t believe it got done.

All three of us are in the movie.

Alex: I run naked through the…

Paul: Yeah, he runs naked through the backyard. Hold on, how did that happen?

Alex: We cast for that scene, made sure everyone was comfortable, but as we got closer and closer, we realized, “Maybe this would be rounded out better with a fourth person.” It just seemed more natural at the time to have another person lying in that shot.

Paul: So it was like, “Take off your pants!”

Alex: Tastefully.

Paul: (laughing) I got to say, I love that.

Michael: (laughing) Can’t go back on that one. It’s on ‘Recording’.

SM: So, this is one of my favorite questions to ask: What is one question about the film that you’ve wanted to be asked so far but have not been asked?

Paul: I don’t know if this is the answer for me, but I’ll let it be my answer—you guys better get thinking. One of the hardest things to do on set, especially when you’ve got actors working for free and everyone’s really tired, is to feed everyone. That’s where a lot of your money goes because you don’t want to be that jerk that starves your actors and then feeds them McDonald’s. So what we had on set a lot was Vitamin Water, which comes in like fifteen varieties. I’ve always wanted to be asked something like, “Did you have any sponsorship for the film?” Because Vitamin Water could have sponsored our movie…Do you like Vitamin Water? That’s my question.

SM: Do you actually like Vitamin Water?

Paul: I like Vitamin Water.

Alex: Yeah!

Michael: I was the only on set who wouldn’t drink Vitamin Water.

Paul: So what are your questions. Mine is, “Do you like Vitamin Water?”

Oh, man. Now I have a better answer.

Michael: Go for it.

Paul: There’s that shot where it says ‘Year Two,’ and Jerzy is walking through the shot, he’s got a beer, he hugs Mike and then he goes over to make-up with Leah. I want to be asked why the grill is full of ice and beer. No one ever notices. The grill isn’t on. It’s just got ice and beer in it, and I spatula a beer to him.

Michael: People say to me, “Yeah, it’s great. You made a lot of different directorial decisions,” which I always think is a funny statement because they never talk about the weird shit, like what convinced us to have fruit cutting itself. Aaron Katz calls it McG directs Natural Causes.

Alex: The stylistic question was actually the one I was going to go with, which Mike just addressed. Why such a mishmash of periodically stylized decision making?

Paul: It’s just the way we think.

Alex: Like it or hate it the film is filled with ideas.

The first 45-minutes are very quickly going through short scenes, and the last 45-minutes drag—‘drag’ is a terrible word to use—but, it focuses minutely on the details involved in single scenes for an extended period of time. It allows for a different atmosphere for both sections, and that came from all of the ideas.

Paul: The next pieces we’re going to work on, we have so many great ideas, both visually with composing shots but also with tricks in the camera, tricks in processing the film, new things that we want to try.

Michael: I remember in film school I was cutting my hair off, sticking it on editing tape and running that over the film, having people swallowed by my hair, having it be a character. Just trying different things like that. As much as I feel like this is a realistic relationship movie, and it’s great that people can confidently say, “This is so realistic,” we were always trying all this crap.

The one thing, I’ll tell you, that I wish people would ask about more is the hotel scene. That’s my favorite scene in the movie—the fact that we did it with no dialogue, it’s kind of impressionistic and there’s no link through it. It’s not so much necessary that those moments actually happened so much as the feelings of those moments are real.

…One of the reasons I like that scene so much is that I feel like that scene was written and directed by all seven people that were on set that day, and that’s kind of a metaphor for me for how the film was made…The movie was really made by all of us.