Elliot Greenebaum started shooting 'Assisted Living' five years ago, when he was twenty two. After receiving numerous awards on the festival circuit, it is now receiving a theatrical release across the country. Mr. Greenebaum recently took the time to participate in the following interview.

I understand the project had an earlier, looser incarnation - is that where the DV footage in the film is derived from? Can you describe the process of turning the film into what it is now, and developing the narrative that is at its core?

For a long time I've felt that the real world--the non-acted, non-scripted one--was more strange and more arresting than the one we develop in our brain when we write and direct fiction. Fiction tends to be generic. So Assisted Living was intended to mine the environment of its documentary moments while remaining a fictional film.

In part, this was due to the fact that I could not build a fake nursing home and stock it with fictional elderly people. I needed to somehow seamlessly blend the scripted moments with the unscripted, observational moments, and my plan for doing so was to use interviews as a palette for images of all kinds--some fictional, some unplanned, some semi-planned. I believed that if I collected interviews from real people and fictional people alike, and then collected scenes from real people and fictional people alike, I could make a wild collage that also told the story of Todd and Mrs. Pearlman. It would have a weird effect, I hoped, because many moments would occupy a kind of strange status between controlled and uncontrolled and therefore the movie, as much as possible, would also live in a kind of uncontrolled space. It follows, then, that it avoids that dry and generic, lazy feeling that I find so disrespectful to audiences when I watch fiction films.

This effort to mix controlled and uncontrolled moments together created further challenges. The actors and non-actors had to seem, roughly, the same in style. And likewise, the camera work had to be the same as well. We couldn't rush around with a hand-held camera for the documentary moments while having nicely edited fictional ones. It was important to use techniques to blur the two together.

My approach, then, was to shoot the fictional scenes in a somewhat loose, organic style, and shoot the
documentary scenes in a very pretty, very saturated, very formal, very stately style. Interviews were shot on DV initially because they were mostly fictional. At this time in film history, DV is associated with realism and documentation, so I didn't want the actors to feel fictional, I wanted them to look kind of crummy compared with the more elegantly shot uncontrolled material.

Initially, then, the DV material was supposed to be the ground from which all the scenes sprang up. Much like a fictional Errol Morris film might be structured. When I edited this together, my hope was
to create a landscape painting of sorts--that happened to include a story of a stoned guy who is confused for someone's son and ends up being fed chocolates on the hillside by the crazy lady.

What I discovered was that viewers (me included) were less interested in this descriptive game of
co-mingling fact and fiction, and much much more interested in the story. I discovered that once you
start telling a story, you have to stick with it. What remains of my original kind of vision for the
film is mostly seen in the first reel, before the story is solidly introduced. From then on, it's rare
that I change course and go back to interviews or uncontrolled material because the audience feels there is a lack of communication and respect; I should know better, they think. They came to see a story.

The second summer of shooting was spend upgrading the story and the editing process was spent trying one last time to make the movie I had wanted--before realizing that it was boring to most people and that Todd and Mrs. Pearlman was the heart of the matter. In a very quick, last minute way, I threw out nearly an hour of characters and lectures, leaving a very straight fiction that occurs in a very real nursing home.

Did you involve the actors in the development of the story, or was it scripted beforehand?

The story was always very simple. Todd wants to be emotionally aloof, Mrs. Pearlman wants to be rescued by her son. He calls her, pretending to be the son, feels guilty, rescues her, and loses his job. The key scenes in this narrative were scripted but that is all. The other scenes were mostly assembled by giving commands for certain actions in spaces filled with non-actors. These were situations that would have been harmed and paralyzed by efforts to control them. We would just try different things out.

The interviews, now largely gone, were deeply scripted--though I would let the actor articulate
ideas in his or her own way. And that was the style throughout the rest of the film as well. I didn't
audition anyone. I just met them. By the time I was writing anything that included dialogue [and not just action (closer to modeling)], I knew exactly who that person was in real life and how he or she talked. I always let their natural style determine their character because otherwise, it would be easy to tell who is an actor and who is a non-actor. One of the achievements of the film is the erosion of this
distinction so it was important to erode the distinction for the professional actors as well--to incorporate as much of their real lives and real mannerisms as possible.

On that note - can you talk about shooting the scene where Todd speaks to Mrs. Pearlman on the phone? Maggie Riley's performance in that scene was spectacular - she reminded me very
much of Ellen Burstyn in Requiem For A Dream. The press kit mentions that you never knew when she was acting or reflecting on her actual life - was this one of those cases? It must have been quite a powerful moment on the set.

The telephone call between Todd and Mrs. Pearlman is the emotional crisis of the film. The audience has been wondering what the emotional crisis of the film is going to be and suddenly, without much warning, it arrives. Structurally, it arrives after, what in film's terms is the "formal" crisis of the film--which is when Todd is immersed in a real Alzheimer's ward comprised, totally, of non-actors who don't understand that he is an actor and not a real janitor. So Todd wants to escape and Mrs. Pearlman wants to escape and the audience wants to escape and the whole things makes a kind of triangle shape.

Both years of shooting, Maggie had to perform this scene. We had to re-shoot it the second summer
because in the adjoining winter, Maggie had summered both a massive heart attack and a stroke. Her speed was different and her body was different. She relates with the anger and fear of her character and the raw fact of performing a scene like that in the middle of a working nursing home is so intense and weird, that an actor can only do one of two things: she can not try, or she can go all the way--but there is no middle. She was very worried about this scene and in rehearsals had sometimes forgotten lines (I think because of her stroke). But when it came time to shoot the scene, later at night in a nursing home near her house, a place she might actually live one day, she nailed it. And that was that.

We applauded so that the residents who were listening from their rooms knew it was acting.

What was the scale of the production, as far as indie films go, and how did you get it all off the ground in the first place?

I don't know what the word "indie film" means anymore. Mostly it's applied to films that are neither
independent, nor films. But without going into the budget, I can assure readers that this was a genuine independent film.

The crew size was about 10 people. There was no script, no script supervisor, no wardrobe, no set
designer, no props master, no assistant director, no production company. It was 10 people, making friends with each other. And making friends with the location.

I've noticed that people in film school or new filmmakers try to make films that look like Hollywood
films, except they are shot inexpensively. They forget that being small allows you to do stuff that a
big movie can't. And that is the goal of smaller films. That's the advantage. I'd like to see Hollywood try to something like Assisted Living.

The wonderful little poem included in the press kit suggests that the residents enjoyed having a movie being shot around their home. Was this indeed the case? Were there any road blocks you encountered, either from residents not wanting to be involved or from the staff of the home itself?

Amazingly, the shoot was very smooth. We spent a lot of time developing trust with the places that we filmed and they always reserved the right to kick us out whenever they wanted.

In terms of the residents, the existence of a movie crew became a boring fact. There was initially a lot
of interest and many residents clamored to be in the movie. They discovered, though, that shooting a movie is actually very boring and they mostly became disinterested and went about their lives. By the end of the second summer, only the residents and staff who we were personally friendly with remained; they were usually people who wanted to be movie stars or who just liked helping out a young filmmaker.

I imagine shooting this film must have been challenging and quite interesting; anything interesting you'd care to relate?

There are endless stories but i will try to distill them to a set of facts.

-It's hard to direct deaf people.
-It's hard to direct scenes when you assume that the actors will stay in the room, even if they're bored.
Often we'd be shooting a scene with a lot of people (like the Bingo scene) and someone would decide that she was bored or that mealtime was approaching (3 hours away) and she would just get up and leave.
-Begging didn't help. The residents would be very polite but ultimately I was just a kid who was making his movie and they had better things to do. They, smiled, nodded (often deafly), and paraded out of the room in the middle of the shoot.
-So we learned to shoot very, very fast.

The editing in the film was really impressive. How did you get in touch with Alan Oxman [editor of all of Todd Solondz's past projects, among others] - can you explain what he brought to the film after shooting was complete? And I noticed that the two editors were both instructors at the Edit Center; was this one of the projects that the students there actually worked on?

Alan Oxman was an important force in the film's success. I arrived in New York with no contacts and considered the Edit Center as a place to get started on the editing. (For readers, The Edit Center is a place that teaches people how to edit by using films that are actually in production as material.)

At first I began work with one of the instructors, Paul Frank. While the students used the film to learn editing, we were editing in my apartment. Paul and I were both young and didn't know how to do things; Paul had never edited documentary material so after the fictional scenes were done, we brought in Adrianna Pacheco to whip the film into shape--which took a long time because there was so much that I was attached to that had to be discarded. Alan Oxman acted like a meta-editor and also as an advisor for the post production and eventually it became clear that he was producing the film. he liked the project and got behind it and I felt far anxious knowing that he was keeping his eye on me as I struggled through post production.

So you were pretty young when you started making this picture; was this your first major project? Did you go to film school?

I went to NYU Grad for a year. Then I began making this film. I have meanwhile graduated from the
program. It would have been smarter for me to learn more about filmmaking before I started. I was very academic and didn't have much experience. But sometimes when you get an idea, you have to follow it right then. When the dailies were coming back, it was clear that something lucky and special was happening.

It's been about two years since the film hit the festivals and first started garnering acclaim; was
it difficult to secure distribution, even with all the good buzz surrounding it, or has there been additional reasons for the interim between then and its release?

The film premiered at Slamdance and won the Grand Jury Prize. Cowboy Pictures--a company that specialized in unusual films like Morvern Callar, George Washington, and Fat Girl --acquired Assisted Living. They placed it on the festival circuit as they ramped up for it's distribution last February and during that time it won the Grand Jury Prizes at almost half the festivals it entered. Unfortunately, Cowboy was facing the realities of the market and declared bankruptcy. Now, one year later, alternative distribution seemed the smart move because we didn't want to lose control of the process.

I read the NY Times Magazine article a few weeks ago about some of the controversies being stirred up; has that settled at all, now that some of the accusers are having a chance to see the film? It seemed to me that most of these critiques clearly came from an uninformed standpoint.

A lot of the attacks and controversies that surround this film come from reactionaries who haven't seen it. But their hearts are in the right place. They are usually people who are deeply invested in helping secure the dignity and comfort of our elders, and I support them in that effort. I'm sure that when they watch the film, they'll feel differently. Instead I think they should be asking these same questions about daytime television--shows like "Ricki Lake" and "MTV Spring Break"--aren't even in the same moral universe as Assisted Living. The focus on Assisted Living is derived from our basic fear of aging and our agreement that it is undignified to be old. The critics of the film often accidentally point the finger at themselves.

Has this film opened any doors for you, and do you have another project in the works?

I writing a movie about the spiritual transformation of a former mayor at a small airport. I encourage readers to see Assisted Living, and if they like that they see, they can count on the next film to be even better.