Selina and Josephine on little and big sisters and Joe Swanberg getting silent and intense
An interview with Selina Robertson from the Independent Cinema Office and Club des Femmes. This interview originally appeared on the Glasgow Film Theatre blog.
Q: We are touring Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely as a pair: they are like a little and big sister on the road. Were you working on both films at the same time in order to get them premiered at Berlinale last year?
Yes – not on purpose but… yes! I wasn’t quite finished with Butter (which I originally thought would be a short) when we went into production on Mild and Lovely, so – it was a sort of unintended frantic goose chase editing the two in overlap… We got pretty far into Mild and Lovely when I started submitting Butter to festivals as a rough cut, and then finally decided: I NEED TO FINISH THIS FILM and took a month off Mild and Lovely to do the final shoots and make it… and when it premiered at Maryland, it made a much bigger splash than I expected – and led to an early invitation to Berlin and then a more concrete relationship with the programmers there. And I think Butter had gotten significantly better than my first round of submissions since it now had the knowledge from the second feature infused into it.
Basically, happy/frenetic accident.
Q: Joe Swanberg has cast you in some of his films including Uncle Kent and Art History. Did you always have him in mind to cast for the role of Akin in Thou Wast Mild and Lovely? If so, why?
Yes. Joe has a sort of silence about him when he directs. He goes into pure drive mode. He’s still pretty relaxed – shoot days are always short with him (or at least they were on the films we worked on together) – but he gets pretty silent and intense, and I really wanted that silent intensity for this character. Ultimately, the irony is that on Thou Wast Mild and Lovely’s shoot, Joe was having a ball and was more relaxed and outgoing than I’d ever gotten to see him – since he wasn’t directing, he could let himself just play. So, Joe off-set was very different than Joe in character.