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Congrats on the Pioneer Screening!

BRENDAN McFADDEN: Yeah, we're excited about it. I've been sending out personal messages to people for the last day or two, asking people to come. I kind of underestimated how long it would take.

So I've read the press kit for the film, which goes into the background of the film, but let's retrace a few of those steps. I know the script for the film went through quite a few permutations over the years. At what point did you decide to just go out there and make it?

AARON KATZ: I think it was during my fourth year at school. I'd had the script for almost two years at that time, and during that year we talked about trying to raise money for it, trying to raise fifty thousand dollars or something like that. And at some point...I believe it was actually Brendan who said we should just do it for for however much money we had right then, which was a few thousand dollars.

BRENDAN: Yeah. I think that the idea of raising money was informed initially a lot by David Gordon Green, because his idea was to shoot George Washington in the fashion that he did to make it formally distinctive from a lot of smaller independent films. I think we had the notion that maybe we should wait and do it like that - do it right, if you will. But I think that, the more we talked about it...I feel like there's so much talking about doing stuff in film, and I think the hardest thing is just sort of saying "I'm going to go ahead and do it."

Brendan, what exactly is the role of a producer on a micro-budgeted film like this?

BRENDAN: I think Katz did his fair share of producing as well, but really, it's kind of just the role of a friend, someone to offer an opinion. I don't think of myself as someone who wants to be a producer, but rather someone who wants to help friends make movies. In school, myself and Marc [Ripper], who produced it with us, and Aaron and I, we all lived together. We all went to school for directing, but I think that for all of us, we'd be happy to help each other make something. It's kind of just about providing support. And in many cases, especially after he made it and after it got into festivals, handling the stuff that maybe...like, I'm a little better at contacting people and being internet savvy and that kind of stuff. That's not so much Katz's bag.

AARON: Yeah, I agree with that. During production, we just kinda ended up dividing stuff into three parts. And whether that was, like, "okay, I'll go see about an amusement park location and you guys go organize with an acting class about getting people to audition," if there's three people doing stuff, you can accomplish more. We all did our share of producing, I think, and what Brendan said about being there to bounce ideas off of was definitely one of the most important things.

The film starts off with the sort of handheld naturalism that we've seen a lot lately, but then goes in slightly different directions. What are some of your stylistic influences?

AARON: I think they come from a lot of different places, and they've changed over time. Things that made sense to me in the past have sort of changed over the years. Initially, when I first went to school, I was really obsessed with Tarkovsy and Tati and stuff like that. Really natural in some ways, but also formal and internal. And Antonioni was big for me at that time too. And I still like all three of those filmmakers, but at the time I was all about never, ever moving the camera and having it be really static. I was like that for the first three years. I did all drama for the first three years. And then my fourth year I did a comedy, and over that period of time I wasn't thinking about the same kinds of things. I guess the thing about those filmmakers that appealed to me was the long-take aesthetic, and not just letting people get the idea of something but actually involving the audience in an actual experience. So I wanted to take those things and have it be a lot looser and have a lot more freedom. So that's sort of where the handheld aesthetic came from. And shooting it in Portland informed the aesthetic somewhat. I grew up there, and there's something about the city that makes me feel like...I don't know. There's something that makes sense about shooting it the way we did.

BRENDAN: And there's the utilitarian concerns, like being able to move quickly.

AARON: Yeah, there's that too.

I feel like there's sort of a generational aesthetic emerging in independent film, at the moment, with films like yours, The Puffy Chair, Mutual Appreciation, LOL. There are all these filmmakers who are embracing this sort of semi-improvisational naturalism. Do you feel like you're part of a movement of some sort?

AARON: I guess now, in some ways, definitely. Since South By Southwest, I've become good friends with Joe Swanberg and, to a lesser extent, Bujalski and the Duplass brothers as well. But at the time, I had no idea who any of those people were, and I suspect a lot of them didn't know each other either, until we met at SXSW. But yeah, as it turns out, I think we all share similar goals, but what's interesting and cool about it is that we're all coming at it from different angles. Although there is a shared goal of finding something more real, it's not all the same.

Definitely. And while you guys are all coming from disparate backgrounds and certainly weren't aware of each other while making your films, it's interesting to see this simultaneous, almost serendipitious movement emerging from the festival scene. It's kind of exciting.

BRENDAN: I kind of wonder if it doesn't stem from some sort of discontent over how independent film was going - or at least our perception of how it was going - and wanting to strike out and do something and, by virtue of that, having to do it cheap.

Going back to the specifics of the film, I'm curious about how the cast: where you got your actors and whether they were actors at all. I know some of them were friends of yours from school...

AARON: Let me think here...Jessica, who played Anna, was a friend of mine from high school. And then Chad [Hartigan] and Brendan were in the movie. But other than that, everyone else was from casting sessions. And some of them were actors. My theater teacher from high school told me about this acting class in Portland that had a lot of young people, and many of the people who came in and auditioned were from that. Cole was from that acting class, but Ryan [White], who played Bill, he just came in on a whim --

BRENDAN: I think, if I recall correctly, a girl who auditioned who we didn't end up casting told him about the audition. He was leaving Portland for Conneticut in two days and decided to come in anyway. We were having trouble finding someone for the part, and I think we knew right away that he was the right guy. We ended up flying him back from Conneticut.

AARON: We didn't have very much money, and he really wanted to be in the movie, so we agreed that we would pay for half of his ticket and he'd pay for half. Throughout production he kept bringing up how he owed us money, but never to this day has he payed us back. In fact, I've run into him a couple of times since, or sometimes calls me when he's in the city, and he's like "oh, we've gotta hang out, I've got your money this time!" And he never does.

Can you talk about shooting Gus' introduction? Did you just get on the bus and shoot the scene? Did you get any interesting responses from the other passengers to the rather graphic dialogue?

AARON: The way we shot it was this. It was actually a train - the light rail in Portland. As it is now, you just see the two guys sitting there, but as we conceived it initally, they were walking and waiting on the stop before they got on the train. We went through this whole complicated process of trying to time it so their walk timed out with when the train was coming and all this other stuff, but that got cut out of the movie and as it is, they're just sitting there. Mark, the other producer, got on the train the stop before and made an announcement that there were going to be people filming at the next stop. He would tell people a.) don't look at the camera or acknowledge that there's a camera there and b.) there's going to be some language that may be offensive to some people. We didn't get any interesting responses, but perhaps that was for the best in that case...

You know that Anatomy Of A Scene show on IFC? I was wondering if you could walk us through the big scene between Gus and Anna, from its inception to what's on screen. It's my favorite scene in the movie - it's really just an amazing piece of film.

AARON: The way I wrote it was that I really wanted to write quickly. So when I was writing it I was trying not to think at all, and things at the party were kind of happening in the script and somehow those two characters ended up out there together. I wrote that scene in one sitting, and it's actually pretty close to what's in the script. Probably ninety five percent of what's on screen is from the script. So I wrote that scene in twenty five minutes or whatever, however long it took me to write without stopping, and I guess it just came from the gut. It seemed right at the time. I don't know. I think I had a spark of an idea that this was the time where our expectations about him turned out not to be true. And the actors, what they brought to it...in that scene especially, it's a tough scene, and Cole really committed to working on it. We had this process of making memories real for him, and working with imagery and stuff like that, creating these memories so he's not just saying the words but they're actually coming from somewhere.

BRENDAN: I think Cole was also the most trained, and he approached it from the point of view of really breaking it down and making a lot of notes. He was very methodical in his preparations.

AARON: Yeah, Cole was a hard worker, in terms of preparing for it. And I think the good thing about it is that you don't see his work on screen. It was the best of both worlds; he worked hard to get things right, but a lot of people who are young and care about acting end up wanting to show you all this work that they've done. Cole was good about throwing it all away.

You were mired in post-production for almost two years. Was that incredibly frustrating, and has that affected how you're working now? I know you're making your new film, Quiet City, very quickly...

AARON: Yeah it was a very frustrating process. It took close to a year and a half, from the time we finished shooting to the time we had a final cut. Pretty much right up until SXSW, we didn't have a final cut. There was the distance thing. Zach, who was cutting it, was working for me for free, and I didn't have a lot of resources. For a while, his hard drive was filled up with things he was getting paid to do and so he couldn't work on Dance Party. Stuff like that. It definitely has informed the way I'm making this new movie, and it's part of the reason why I'm cutting it myself. I know that I can cut it in a month, a month and a half.

BRENDAN: I think also the post-process was a bit of a roller coaster ride emotionally, in that there were times when when it seemed like maybe we should make it a short, and a lot of us had different ideas about what to do with it, and at times it seemed like a hopeless endeavor...

AARON: But I will say that the one good thing about having all those ups and downs is that it turned out a better movie than it would have been if it had been cut in a couple months. The movie it turned out to be...I'm pretty happy with it, and it's the best movie it could be. In that way, it's a good thing we had so long to think about it and let it come to what it is now.

I know you're selling copies of the film online. Is that an official release, or are you going to have something more substantial somewhere down the road?

BRENDAN: We are going to have something more substantial in the future. I'm not sure exactly what it's going to be. Right now, yeah, you can buy it for twelve dollars and it's a burned DVD with just the movie on it. If you want it, you can certainly buy it online, but there will be something more. There's a couple more festivals that are going to happen, so probably sometime in late spring of next year there'll be a new DVD.

That sort of wraps up my line of questioning. Do either of you have any final thoughts prior to the official theatrical premiere of the film?

AARON: Brendon, do you want to add anything?

BRENDAN: I don't know. I was writing this long thing for the invitations to the screening that I ended up scrapping, this statement about the whole experience...I think that for us, the whole SXSW experience was really great, just in terms of SXSW and Matt Dentler supporting the film, and as a way to meet other people. You're meeting people who are excited about the same things you are, and who are making films as well, and it feels very friendly and communal and not at all competitive, which I think is pretty great.

AARON: I really liked that, too. And to add on to that, coming out of school, I had this idea that I think a lot of people feel in film school, that going out and making a movie is really ovewhelming and frustrating and there's all these reasons not to do it. And the experience of making Dance Party and then meeting all these different people who've gone out and done these movies, it's really encouraging to think that it's not overwhelming. The best thing to do is to just run headlong into it and make something, and to find reasons to do it rather than reasons not to do it. With this new movie that I've been doing, there's a lot of stuff that we didn't have planned out in advance.

BRENDAN: I think we had much less planned out in advance on Quiet City...

AARON: Yes, much less. But the fact is that it's all the more exciting to discover.