“Don’t Go To Film School, Or I’ll Hunt You Down With A Hatchet”: Harley Chamandy on Werner Herzog, Artistic Influences, and Self-Distributing His Breakout Indie, ‘Allen Sunshine’

After 11 years in the filmmaking business, Harley Chamandy has yet to tire of the “grind,” as they say. Perhaps that’s because he only recently turned 25 and because the previous decade of work unfolded in the short film space until his feature debut – the 2024 gem Allen Sunshine is now available on VOD, and is screening at New York City’s Roxy Cinema on Friday, April 25th – was introduced to the world last year. Or maybe it’s because grind is all he knows as a first-time feature director who has handled the distribution and marketing of Allen Sunshine on his own. Even with the now-Oscar-winning Alex Coco (Anora) as an executive producer, getting Allen Sunshine in front of audiences fell (and still falls) on Chamandy’s shoulders. His hustle is only part of the reason this interview took place. The other? The film—which centers on a grieving music producer (Vincent Leclerc) who relocates to the Canadian woods to mourn and rediscover himself— is a special piece of work.

Chamandy first messaged me on X/Twitter within 24 hours of me logging his film on Letterboxd, thanking me for watching the film and offering his availability for a potential interview. He’s done the same with writers and editors at publications like Sight and Sound, The Guardian, and Paper Magazine, with each review helping the film’s visibility and each chat more illuminating than the last. My curiosity was piqued by his film and his methods, not least because he had won the 2024 Werner Herzog Film Prize after Allen Sunshine’s premiere at the Munich Film Festival. (Past winners include Chloe Zhao and Asghar Farhadi.) “Why on earth is this award-winning director reaching out to me directly?” I wondered. When we finally met over Zoom, I raised that fact to him straight up. He offered some insight, not just on his self-distribution efforts but also on his filmmaking influences, his plans for the future, and the Montreal-born filmmaker’s thoughts on how his home country has all but rejected his feature debut. Here are excerpts from our long chat, which have been edited for context and clarity.

Will Bjarnar: First of all, I love that you reached out directly to me. I think that’s really cool. Because while I learned about your film through coverage in outlets like The Film Stage [Allen Sunshine was included in their 2024 round-up lists of “The 50 Best 2024 Films You Might Have Missed” and “The Best Directorial Debuts of 2024”] and obviously soon saw the film, it was cool to have the director of a truly independent film showing how much they care about their work by reaching out to people that have seen the film.

Harley Chamandy: Sight and Sound took me, like, six months of [pushing for coverage]. At one point, [the S&S editor] was like, “Please stop.” And I was like, “Nah, I gotta make this happen.” I think [winning the 2024 Werner Herzog Film Prize] opened more doors, but I just wanted people to know about this thing. I think that this is something really important that I’ve learned as a young, emerging filmmaker. It’s more than just making a film. It’s being your own press. It’s the end of the era of the “mystical filmmaker,” like a young Terence Malick. That was a really cool thing, but it could never exist anymore. Society has changed, and so much is getting put out there; there’s so much noise. So, seeing that, I realized, “I’m going to have to do this all on my own. It’s gonna be a freaking grind.” And it is a grind. I just got a one-week theatrical release in Miami. I’m about to screen at the Roxy Cinema on April 25th in New York. I just really want people to see it in the cinema. I’ve been self-distributing, and it’s paid off. 

Will Bjarnar: Well, let’s talk about that. When was the film officially released last year? I know it was at the Munich Film Festival first for its world premiere.

Harley Chamandy: Right, but we basically released it on November 12th on Apple TV+ and Amazon. Simultaneously, it was screening at Lincoln Center, the Angelika, the Curzon in London, a theater in Montreal, etc. 

Will Bjarnar: So, you did all of those screenings, plus the release on VOD platforms. But now it’s going to the Roxy. You were just in France, and then in Miami… Is it just because you are self-distributing it that it’s had this untraditional rollout? Technically, it’s a 2024 release, but now we’re well into 2025, and it’s still getting programmed. That has to be exciting, to have it play wherever it can be played, no matter when it was released.

Harley Chamandy: Honestly, it’s just that people don’t know about it. This is the problem: Not to get on my high horse, but most people who watch the film like the film. It’s speaking to people, it’s crossing borders. I also showed it at a festival in Siberia that’s run by [two-time Palme d’Or-winning director] Emir Kusturica. They had like seven films in the whole festival, and they found mine somehow. It’s a good film, people just need to know about it. Truthfully, if I had someone like NEON or A24 pushing it out, it would be a whole other situation. But that’s just how the industry works, and that’s okay. You have to be patient. I’m also about to show it in Maine at “Space,” this arts museum kind of vibe, and then we’re going to Prince Edward Island, so it is, like, keeping the movie alive in a sense, you know?

Will Bjarnar: I think you touched on something really interesting there. In the current cinematic landscape, a new film could be coming out and getting coverage before anybody other than a very select few people have actually seen the movie. And then the movie comes out, there’s some more reporting on it being a big hit or something of that nature, and then after a week or two, it dies. Or, at least, a broad conversation about it goes dormant until we reach the end of the year. I say all of that to say that I think what you’re doing is important, and it can’t be easy, not least because of all of the travel it requires.

Harley Chamandy: Yeah, these are all great things, but they lead to burnout. I’m exhausted, but I have to keep grinding and getting the film out there. I wish more critics were able to write about the film. Maybe don’t quote me on who I was close to convincing. [He laughs; I comply.] 

But one thing I would really love for you to quote is that I’ve gotten zero coverage in Canada. I’ve tried everything you can imagine, from reaching out to every single freakin’ critic, the Toronto [International] Film Festival, and everyone refuses to cover my film. Canada has zero support for a young Canadian filmmaker who has not only won the Werner Herzog Award but has also been on best-of lists, covered in Sight & Sound, etc. I can’t even get one review in the Globe & Mail. And to me, that’s the most frustrating thing.

Will Bjarnar: I remember seeing you tweet about that a while ago, but when I went back to look for the tweet so I could ask you about this specifically, I couldn’t find it.

Harley Chamandy: I probably deleted it. I don’t even care at this point. I’m gonna say how I feel, you know what I mean? 

Will Bjarnar: Why do you think that has been the case with your lack of Canadian coverage? Honestly, I think there has been a gamut of excellent Canadian cinema in the last few years that goes beyond the David Cronenbergs of the world. In the last few months, we’ve seen Philippe Lesage’s Who By Fire and Kazik Radwanski’s Matt & Mara receive extensive coverage. I’m curious if you have an idea why your film hasn’t been given the same treatment.

Harley Chamandy: They’re a little more tapped in, for sure. Like, [Kazik Radwanski] is on like his fifth or sixth movie, and Philippe Lesage is Quebecois. That’s another thing: It’s very political. I’ll say it how it is; I don’t care at this point; I’m too far gone. But being an English-speaking person in Quebec is like having everything against you. They’re not going to support you. If your movie’s not French and if you’re not Quebecois, it’s not the vibe. Dude, I’ve been able to get a screening at Lincoln Center, and I can’t even get a local arthouse in Montreal. That, to me, is the most defeating thing. I feel like I’m kind of rambling, but it feels good to talk to you about this ’cause you’re a critic; you understand it’s a grind. I’m reaching out to you; that’s still a grind. But for Canada to not even be down to give me the time of day is extremely frustrating. Like, what other 22-year-old kid do you know that is getting awarded by his idol? 

Will Bjarnar: Let’s talk about the Herzog connection. You won the Herzog Foundation prize last year, but long before that, you participated in his first-ever young filmmakers workshop when you were 17 and had started embarking on a filmmaking career even earlier. How has Herzog’s work influenced you in that journey? What did you learn from his workshop that has since influenced you?

Harley Chamandy: Well, just to make it super clear, I did his workshop when I was 17, and I completely lost contact with him after that. I just thought I was another student and that he would never remember my name. So, with the award, it seems like there was some tie-in, but you don’t understand: This guy wanted nothing to do with me. I tried to get his email, and he was like, “It’s time for you to move on, dude.” I tried to have that rapport, and he was just not into it. Honestly, I think that might have helped me grow as an artist. He actually said to me when I was 17, “You have to grow your own wings and fly. I’m just a guy here to give you a little bit of advice.” But I think the most important thing he said to me at the workshop was, “Don’t go to film school, or I’ll hunt you down with a hatchet.” I had just applied to film school, and I was like, “Fuck.” I called my mom and said, “We have to cancel the applications.” I ended up doing one semester at Pratt and absolutely hated it. I transferred to NYU to study global liberal arts, and I think what Herzog was really saying to me was, “You should be friends with someone like a butcher. You shouldn’t be around film people because you’re never going to be inspired by film people. You’re gonna be inspired by real life.” He told me to read classics, to learn a language, to go abroad. 

Since I was a kid, I’ve always felt like I was making movies to compete with my idols, not to compete with a film student. I never felt like a film student. [Filmmaking] is just this natural thing, right? When I did win the Herzog award, someone asked me how I was able to deal with these heavy topics, and I didn’t know how to answer it because it’s always been something to me that has been more of a divine, secretive thing when I write a script. But Herzog answered for me and said, “You wouldn’t ask Mozart how he knows how to play the piano so young.” So, it’s inherent in you, that understanding, but then to hear Herzog saying it, it felt like I was truly being understood by a peer. My whole life, I’ve wanted to be at the level of the people I looked up to. This was the tap on my shoulder telling me that I was on the right track. It doesn’t mean I made it. It just means that I’ve trusted my gut long enough that now I’m on stage with the person who made me want to make films. He’s been so uncompromising and true to his voice for 60-plus years. He’s a singular artist. 

Will Bjarnar: I mean, between Grizzly Man and Aguirre, the Wrath of God… Come on.

Harley Chamandy: I just thought of something. I think how it really all started was that I was really into fashion as a young kid. You know how kids have that stage where they dig Supreme and skating… Through that, I found Kids by Harmony Korine, and then through Harmony Korine, I found Werner Herzog. I think Herzog to me was the source for someone like Korine’s work.

Will Bjarnar: That’s fascinating because I don’t see those influences in your work. At least not in Allen Sunshine.

Harley Chamandy: Yeah, I’m not necessarily influenced by their films. I’m more influenced by any movies, honestly. I’m more influenced by painting, fashion, stuff like that… I actually wrote my college application essay on how the world had too many collage artists that everyone is taking from one another, and that’s why art is really uninteresting. I know you’re a critic, but I really believe that I wouldn’t be making films if I thought there were that many good films out there. 

Will Bjarnar: Would you not classify yourself as a cinephile, then?

Harley Chamandy: I’ve never said that I’m a cinephile or anything, but I live for art and film. When I think of a cinephile, it’s too boxed in. To be a great artist, you have to be a file of the arts or whatever. I don’t know if there’s a word for that. But you have to see something in everything. That’s why I think there are so many lousy movies these days. It’s not just about the storytelling. It’s about what the characters are wearing, what the music sounds like, etc. To me, film is the most divine art form, and it seems like all these filmmakers don’t understand. They have this blank canvas, and they waste so much of it just trying to make some narrative movie. There’s so much more to film than that. I’m really frustrated by it. I don’t know how you feel, but I’ve left some bad reviews about movies that most people think are great. And now that my own film is getting a bit of press, people are saying, “How could you write such a bad review on a film?” But it’s just how I feel. Am I not allowed to have my opinion on how films should be? 

What I tried to do with my film, and what I hope audiences do with it, is surrender to it and just be present with it. Someone came up to me after a screening once and said, “This film is very Buddhist.” I never thought of it that way, but I guess there’s something very meditative about it. Look, I love movies. I’ll watch anything from any country, but I always viewed filmmakers as artists, not as filmmakers. I don’t even like saying that I’m a filmmaker. I feel more like an artist who uses the medium. 

Will Bjarnar: You said that you think about things like paintings and pictures. Is that, then, how you’re structuring your films? Are you thinking about the process through that lens, that you’re making a moving work of art with images that move as opposed to something still, like a painting?

Harley Chamandy: Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe the best way to answer that… Sometimes, I don’t even understand where something is coming from when I’m writing a script. I just love cinema and everything about film, but I guess I don’t actually love “technical” filmmaking. I do love filmmaking in terms of the actual process, but I’m not as excited talking about camera gear. I don’t care about that stuff as much.

Will Bjarnar: Your shorts are even more interesting to think about then. You made The Final Act of Joey Jumbar and Where It’s Beautiful When It Rains…

Harley Chamandy: There’s one in between that I removed offline. [Laughs.]

Will Bjarnar: Why is that? 

Harley Chamandy: I was, like, 16. It was called The Maids Will Come On Monday. It was a family drama. At the time, I knew nothing about how short film festivals worked or anything. And I felt with Joey Jumbler, I gave it my all and didn’t get the results I wanted. And I thought maybe I had to follow more of a formula. I went against my gut and made a film that was trying to be commercial. It looks beautiful and all that, but it’s not really me. 

Will Bjarnar: Aside from the obvious – the size of the crew, shoot duration, script, etc. – what are the key differences for you when you’re making a short versus an Allen Sunshine?

Harley Chamandy: Allen Sunshine is what I feel like I had to say. It felt like something that had been dormant in me for years, and I just never had the way to say it. I think it’s an accumulation of my aesthetic point of view of the world and also just my point of view of what and how a film should be. I think if I died tomorrow, I would die very happily knowing that I made a film I am 110 percent proud of. On the artistic level, I truly would not change anything. What I’ve learned is that the best method for me is keeping the people that you really love on your set. My girlfriend [Samantha Vocatura] does the costume designs; my mom [Chantal Chamandy] does producing and editing; one of my best friends, Kenny [Suleimanagich], shot the film. It’s a feeling having this energy where the people around you are excited about making great art. No one’s there for just another day at work. I think that’s really important. But to answer your question, I made Joey Jumbler at 17. What do I know yet? With Where It’s Beautiful When It Rains, I made a short film in three days because I really liked this child actor who was about to go on Broadway, so I wrote the script there and then, and we went out and had fun. That short was a reminder of why I love film. We went against all the rules: No permits, no crew, and it was just really exciting. The difference is that with Allen Sunshine, I was able to say what I really wanted to say in the film.

Will Bjarnar: Where did it come from, then? I know you had this image of a man on a boat in the middle of a lake. Was that all it took?

Harley Chamandy: I think that at the end of the day, no matter how you cut the cake, I view art as a sport. I think it’s very competitive. I want to be the best at what I do. I feel like that’s some Timothée Chalamet shit, but like, it’s really how I’ve always viewed it. I believe in objective good taste. And I think that the larger your toolbox is, the more you can inform yourself. And that’s why I’m so specific about what I think a good film is. I think that’s the accumulation of my toolbox, right? It’s a film where the image is at the forefront. The music plays such a strong role; the quiet, the delicate details like [the scene where] the little girl takes the bow out of her hair and puts it on a dog. That’s what I think makes great cinema. If you go back to all the work that I think is great work, that’s what these artists were doing. It’s a sensitivity that I feel is lacking in modern cinema. That’s something I’ve been chasing. The scene when [Allen] eats the pie, and the kids he’s with are doing magic tricks with a coin? These are all ideas. There are all these little things I want my films to have. I really want to push this agenda that all art comes from the same place, whether you’re a fashion designer, a poet, a musician, or a painter. I am really trying hard to make conceptual, modern art more welcoming to cinema because I think they exist in the same way, but society divides them in a sense.

Will Bjarnar: Another quote of yours from the past: You had the desire to “want to tell a story about love and friendships, and what it means to live with and without them. Thematically, that’s omnipresent in modern cinema, especially of the independent variety. You take that and broaden the scope of it while remaining intimate, crafting the story of a 40-something widower, and you’re only 25. How do you go about shaping that while writing the script? Are you working with your actors? Going off of life experiences, yours or others?

Harley Chamandy: It’s me alone. I am getting inspired by the music that I was listening to throughout and just trusting my gut. If you want to know how I really feel, it’s just that in every scene, I’m trying to make a fire scene, and somehow, it all kind of comes together. Like, that’s it. I’m not an intellectual. I’m not thinking about how the character feels. I’m just going with, “What’s the most fire thing he could say?” And I know it’s weird, and  it’s the least obvious thing someone would tell you, but I’m writing it, and I’m like, “I want him to play chess now because I think it’s going to look great.” It also works on an emotional level because [Allen] can’t connect with a woman at that moment. But I’m not thinking about the emotional thing. I know it’s right, and I’m never doubting myself. And the minute I do doubt myself is the minute that I know it’s wrong. Here’s an example: In the film, you never see flashbacks. I actually wrote them at the last minute and put them in, and I shot them, but I never put them in the movie. I should have trusted my gut there because I wasted a whole day shooting flashbacks that I knew, deep down, were not right for this film. It’s a film about the now, about the present, and it didn’t matter if you ever saw [Allen’s late wife]. It’s just about his feeling in that moment.

Will Bjarnar: Who’s your therapist?

Harley Chamandy: I don’t have one. I’ve never been to therapy.

Will Bjarnar: Screw you. I had therapy at 8:45 this morning.

Harley Chamandy: Herzog says never go to therapy! It’s better that we never talk about the dark stuff of humanity. 

Will Bjarnar: I think it’s impossible for you not to be thinking about the emotional, thoughtful side of it, though. It’s almost offensive that you’re not. 

Harley Chamandy: Well, it’s a very deep thought. I do really love humanity, and I know that it’s a really hard thing to love, especially in the modern world. But I really believe that choosing optimism is choosing happiness. I think I learned that really early on. I read a book by this Vietnamese monk when I was in my junior year of college, and there’s one thing that stood out to me. He just says happiness is a habit. That clicked with me. I was like, “Fuck. Why is everyone chasing this shit? You can just convince yourself?” I feel like something happens [within you] where everything becomes beautiful. I’m trying to view everything in a beautiful way. Now I feel like you’re my therapist because I’m saying this out loud, and it’s kind of hitting me back, but I’ve never really been able to understand why I know these things. 

Huh. That got deep.

Will Bjarnar: Let’s get deeper then. It’s ironic to ask because I know you didn’t necessarily like getting technical, but it’s important to do this. The film’s look and sound feel like narrative choices just as much as they are stylistic ones. Why are you inclined to make these choices, like shooting on 16mm film and sourcing synths for Allen‘s music production? Those are specificities that a great many films wouldn’t care to make. 

Harley Chamandy: That’s literally where I think modern cinema has gone wrong. No one cares about that stuff much anymore. I really wanted to make a film that felt timeless. That was one of the biggest things for me. I wanted to make something where there wasn’t a time period where everything in it could exist 10 years from now or 10 years ago. I don’t want any of my films to be dated at any time because if a film is dated, for me, it loses emotional resonance. There aren’t any iPhones or computers. Even the clothes are all secondhand.

I really wanted to explore an artist that was making art for themselves. That’s a very rare thing that is not really portrayed in modern media. There is something really beautiful about the artist who just makes the work for themselves and is not thinking about the audience. And you know, that was always something for me. When I would go to Q&As and ask filmmakers something, I’d always ask the same question: “Do you think about the audience when you’re making a film?” I would always ask that because, to me, I figured that all these great artists would never think about the audience. Especially Lars von Trier; he was big for me. The same goes for Harmony Korine, Vincent Gallo, Michael Haneke, Abbas Kiarostami, etc.

Will Bjarnar: Would you say that’s how you approached this film?

Harley Chamandy: With this one, I was really trying to make a movie that I liked. But from now on, what I really want to do is go to Hollywood to make a film that can keep the same sensibilities but be more populist and have a broader fare. As in, “How could I make something like Allen Sunshine, but for the masses?

Will Bjarnar: I think Allen Sunshine should be something considered “for the masses,” if you will. For audiences who have seen it or are going to see it soon, what do you hope they take away from the film if there’s even one specific thing?

Harley Chamandy: Maybe if you learn to live like a child again, you can realize what really matters in life. Or, once you rediscover how to live again through the eyes of a child? I don’t know. Something like that. I don’t even know; honestly, there is probably nothing. Whatever you take from it, you take from it. I think the truth is that you have to stay curious, like a child, about the generosity of life. It opens up to you more, and you see things for what they are. So many kids these days are depressed and have so many issues. And I think that once they understand that having gratitude for the small things in life, like a conversation or having a piece of pie, that’s really what life’s about. It’s about playing with your dog, and everything else is extra.

Allen Sunshine screens at the Roxy Cinema in New York City on Friday, April 25. It is also available to rent on VOD.

One of the best sports movies in years, Carson Lund’s Eephus, is now available to watch at home. It’s a somber film in many ways, but also one that is deeply romantic and full of comfort. From the gorgeous visuals to capturing just how poetic a sport baseball can be, Eephus is a film perfect for baseball fans, cinephiles, and anybody who has ever experienced the beauty of having a third place in their life. I was able to chat with writer/director/editor Carson Lund and cinematographer Greg Tango about their process, the unpredictable nature of baseball on film, and what a third place means to them. 

Alex Papaioannou: I figure there’s no better place to start than by asking how you both got into baseball.

Carson Lund: Well, I’ve been playing forever. Greg, maybe you weren’t even a baseball guy before this [Laughs.] Did I bring you into baseball through Eephus?

Greg Tango: I played a lot growing up and in high school with friends. I didn’t play to the level that Carson did, but when I was a kid, it was Little League. Then in high school, it was playing pickup with my friends. That’s sort of why this story resonated with me in the first place.

Carson Lund: I should also say we played some pickup games as a cast and crew, and Greg was one of the better hitters. [We all laugh.] But I’ve been playing forever. I played in travel leagues when I was a kid, and when I moved to LA, I joined an adult rec league. So for the last 10 years, I’ve been playing in that, and it’s a big influence on the film. It’s all in the people that I play with and the characters I’ve met over the years. It’s just such a great kind of escape from daily life, and I wanted to capture the feeling of playing a game like that on a Sunday.

Alex Papaioannou: One of my favorite things about this film is it embodies the essential nature of a third place. We’re losing so many of them for a variety of reasons, and I’m curious about the impact it may have had on the film. Have you had any examples of losing a place that meant a lot to you, like the players do in the film?

Carson Lund: There are honestly too many to count. One of the most direct ways is how now that I live in LA, I don’t just have access to a park like I did in the past. There are parks, obviously, but I have to drive quite a ways to them. I mean in the sense of just a place that I can walk to and run around and shoot a basketball or something like that. All the space is already accounted for. That’s a space I always had in my life: a park that I could quickly get to. There’s also the change that’s occurred in going to the movies at the movie theater. Obviously, those can be a for-profit space, so it’s not quite the same. But I just remember growing up, and theaters being such a rallying point for people. Same thing with coffee shops. They were places where people all hung out. I think of my hometown library. It used to be really busy all the time, and now people don’t go in as much because everyone reads on their Kindle or they stream whatever. Mine had a great media section, so I grew up there while talking to people… And you know what? The biggest one is the video store. For me, losing a video store in my hometown cuts off such a great source of discovery for people. When you just doom scroll through a streaming service, it’s not quite the same.

Alex Papaioannou: Here’s hoping places like these, to lounge and connect and be off your phone, make a comeback. By any chance, are either of you familiar with John DeMarsico?

Carson Lund: The broadcaster, right?

Alex Papaioannou: Yes! The game director for the Mets on SNY. I’m a big fan of his, and what he’s doing for the live telecast of baseball is exciting. He’s been quoted as saying that baseball is inherently cinematic, more so than other sports. He provides his own details, but I’m curious: After shooting a baseball film, in your own words, what do you think it is about baseball that makes it such a cinematic experience?

Greg Tango: In a lot of ways, baseball is all about reacting, right? It’s a lot of waiting, which is one of the themes of the movie. I think what makes it cinematic is that you never know where something’s going to go. The ball moves from person to person, and it’s almost like a dance in a weird way. You’re capturing these people move. With our film, we constructed it based on how baseball is played. There are people crossing the frame. There’s a lot of movement and depth. I feel that in other sports, everything follows the ball in one direction. It all starts in one place and goes back and forth. In baseball, we go to every corner of the field. You can hit a ball to left field, then it might come back all the way to home, or quickly head to third base, or something like that. It moves around quite a bit. And as that happens, the depth of the area changes. You’re seeing people in both the outfield and infield. It just has a lot of range to it.

Carson Lund: Yeah, that’s a great point. The spacing is very different from a lot of other sports, where people move in a group or in a big chunk. And I think that’s always fun within deciding composition and cinematography. How can you place people quite far away from each other, but still make sure they have a relationship? You can work with deep focus to guide the eye around a very wide frame. That was something we really enjoyed doing with this film. I’d say the other part of it that makes it inherently cinematic is that it’s a sport that facilitates socializing. All that downtime results in people just chatting. That’s something I always enjoy seeing: how people fill their time with small talk. And then the dugout itself is so much like a Plato’s cave situation. At least the one we picked is. Everyone’s enclosed, and they’re looking out on this world that, when we’re shooting into the dugout, we don’t see. But we watch their faces watch it. And I think that’s always a very cinematic feeling: being able to look in at someone who’s looking out, and not being able to see what they’re looking out into.

Alex Papaioannou: Greg mentioned one of the things about baseball that is exciting is how unpredictable it is. You’re hitting a small ball with a bat that’s rounded, and it could just go anywhere. So, in terms of shot composition and planning out a film around the game, can you both talk about the challenges of capturing the unpredictable side of the sport?

Carson Lund: It’s almost a casting question. When we cast this film, I was looking for people with baseball experience, but you also have to be flexible. It’s a very specific thing that we needed: men in their 40s or 50s, or 60s even, who had somewhat recent experience and had some athletic skill in the Boston area. It was a very small peg we were trying to hit [said while laughing.] So inevitably, the skill level was not quite where I would have hoped or expected it would be, but I think that actually ended up being a blessing and produced a lot of very comical sloppiness. And so we just tried to embrace that. Part of that was by shooting in master shots, so we could see everything happening at once. There’s a lot of funny stuff happening, and I’ve seen it a few times in theaters recently, and people always laugh at certain moments. I think it’s because you can see everything happening. It sort of follows Chaplin’s idea of comedy being in long shots, and tragedy being in close-up. As far as choreographing it, a lot of the time it was very carefully thrown to a specific part of the frame. So Greg and I would have to collaborate on that. Usually, I’d be the one throwing because no one else in the crew had that accuracy. [Laughs].

Greg Tango: And sometimes, there were certain things we were worried about taking a long time to get, and we would get it really quickly. Or the opposite would happen, and things we weren’t worried about would take longer. Baseball is funny in that way. There’s one shot specifically that I’m thinking of. I think the ball comes from third to first, and I’m kind of shooting from behind first base, looking towards third. I remember we had a wall of flags around me. We had a crew member ready to jump in front to try and grab the ball if it happened to go over. So we did a lot of protecting the camera and ourselves. Luckily, we never even came close to hitting the camera or anything like that. It all ended up being pretty smooth.

Carson Lund: I will say one thing about that. There was one time when we had the camera set up between the mound and home plate. We put up a huge tent around the camera, so there was only a little hole where the lens could see out. And I remember Ethan [Ward] was hitting, and he hit it a few inches away from that little lens hole. But otherwise we were fine. If it went through that hole, the very expensive lens would have been shattered, and it would have thrown off the shoot, but we didn’t really have another way. We didn’t want to resort to VFX. So everything you see is a real ball moving through space, and real people catching it or throwing it.

Alex Papaioannou: Going off of what you’re both saying, a lot of baseball feels miraculous. That meant both in the context of baseball being played and in capturing it in a way that translates to an audience. And there are a lot of moments that feel organic and spontaneous throughout the film. Were some of these moments where you just followed the dugout or batters prepping the swing? Did you have these images in your mind going into the film, or was it after the fact that you could play around with the items commonly found on a baseball field?

Carson Lund: The film was thoroughly shot-listed and storyboarded. Greg and I did so much work in the run-up to the film. We just went over every single shot and talked it through to make sure we understood exactly what we were trying to capture. That was really important for scheduling, in terms of figuring out where the sun would be at any given moment. As the editor, I’m editing the film in my head as I make the storyboards, and even as I write the script. So we don’t always feel that we need anything extra on set. But there’s always going to be something that happens that excites you, or there’s a detail that a character does that you then want to spotlight in some way. A lot of this was figured out very carefully, but I should also note that sometimes an actor had their schedule change, so they couldn’t be on set. You might have to suddenly think about how a shot needs to be shrunk entirely if there’s nobody to fill the spot from far away. So there were cases where it wasn’t exactly what we planned, but we always had a lot of people on set, so we could always figure something out to get the shot.

Alex Papaioannou: There’s a lot of idle time, both in the film and in baseball in general. It works so well in the film. Greg, there are moments where you’ll just be shooting the outfield, and the characters aren’t really doing much of anything, and it’s intentional. Sometimes they’re muttering to themselves or chatting. Can you talk about whether there was any challenge in making “nothing” look cinematic?

Greg Tango: Yeah, we talked a lot about it in prep. It goes for any sort of movie as well. You just ask the question: What’s the point of the scene? What are we trying to say? We might to build something up visually before the payoff later. It’s figuring out the point of the scene and just building around that. One example is how we see Dilberto (David Torres Jr.) build up to getting mad in the film. Sometimes you’ll see him in the background looking off at other things, or there’s a shot where you see him getting ready to start leaving the field. It’s all about figuring out what the point of a moment is, and then layering your shot that way.

Carson Lund: Sometimes there’s what you call a pillow shot, where it’s just the clouds or the trees. I think those are really important for the editing flow. And here we also have people just hanging out when there’s not a play happening with them. We really did talk about all those moments. The script was written in such a way that every unit of time was accounted for. Every out. Every inning. What is happening now? And how is that advancing something that happens later? So it really was constructed in such a way that everything had some kind of payoff, even if it’s just a very small, subtle payoff. But the film just keeps planting seeds.

Alex Papaioannou: It all lends itself to the naturalistic feeling the film has, and it capitalizes on it in a wonderful way. We mentioned comedy beats earlier, and this is also a very funny film. The Linda Belinda line gets me every single time. I adore it. But it’s also a very somber film at the end of the day. It’s upsetting, but in a cathartic way. So can you talk about balancing that comedy versus that sadness, and never sacrificing one for the other?

Carson Lund: I think the somberness or melancholy is just inherent in the scenario: this is the last time they’re going to do this. The whole film is a slow march towards the end. And the conflicts that arise in the film have everything to do with light and the passage of time, right? The ball disappears, the light fades. People start leaving, and they get sore. It’s a very funereal film. So it’s hard to escape that somberness. And for me, the comedy is there to evade the darkness. It’s in all these men trying to find ways to ward off that creeping feeling of the end. And they’re using their old tricks, their old jokes, and their old lingo to avoid talking about the end. So in a way, I see the beginning to be just as somber as the ending. In some sense, if you’re really watching it and thinking about what these guys are doing, it’s like they’re all just performing this ritual for the last time. They’re just being a version of themselves in a very active, deliberate way so that they can avoid the fact that they’re actually quite sad about this. So I don’t really think of the two as completely different. But the film certainly does slow down in its pacing, and then as it gets darker, we play with a lot of new visual ideas that create bigger areas of darkness. It makes that feeling very literal. Greg, could you talk about shooting some of that night stuff?

Greg Tango: Shooting the night stuff was super fun. It was a big, elaborate setup. We created layers with the headlights and the park itself to make the streaks of light sort of separate the space between the players.

Alex Papaioannou: Greg, this is a very natural film in terms of its imagery and shot composition, but there are two moments that I was just blown away by. There’s such a stark shift in the style and visual language of the film. One is when the eephus pitch is first brought up, and we just see the ball in the frame. It’s almost like a moment from a Wong Kar-Wai film, that slow-moving blur, as if it’s frozen in time. And then there’s a home run scene at golden hour, which follows the batter through some slow motion. Can you talk about filming those two specific moments and the shift they take?

Greg Tango: For the eephus pitch, the first few shots focus on the pitcher in that really weird light. It was just a moment where we got to set, and it was one of those days that was a little hazy, and the sun wasn’t up yet. Carson and I were like, “We gotta get this. Let’s get the camera.” I think it was just me, Carson, and Nate [Fisher]. Everybody else was still getting ready. But we knew we just had to roll. And then it changed five minutes later. So I think we only got two or three shots, and one made the film. And then that shot you’re talking about with the ball itself, that’s actually Carson. He did that in LA afterwards!

Carson Lund: [Laughs.] It’s funny, you picked one of the only shots in the film that was a pickup we did away from the East Coast. Originally, that scene was just playing purely as a dialogue with comedy. But I wanted to get at some other level of the idea that he’s talking about. It’s kind of like the essence of the film. He’s talking about trying to stop time and achieve this dream-like state through a pitch or through the game. So I knew I wanted that kind of thing there. I didn’t know if it would completely work because, you’re right, it is sort of an outlier. But I didn’t have the right camera or lenses to pull that off on set. It wasn’t the same stuff we shot with, but I did my best to color it the same. Essentially, we tried a lot of different ways to capture that shot. At first, I was actually planning with the ball being thrown. But it was just too fast to follow, so I knew I wanted that slow shutter effect, like Wong Kar-Wai. I was thinking about David Lynch, too. But we ended up actually dangling a ball from a string, and the camera is actually in one place. My friend was holding the camera, and I was dangling the ball. He was slowly turning the camera, and we were dangling the ball so that the slight pan of the camera created that background motion. It’s just very small-scale trickery [laughs.] But it ends up looking pretty real. I had to paint out some moments where the string was falling into frame, but I can’t think of another way to capture that shot, short of maybe having a studio and some complicated wind rig.

Greg Tango: For the home run moment, I think that was the first time of two moments that we used slow motion in the movie. We just wanted to build up this moment, and then, as they come into home plate, to slow it down. We did a lot to try and keep flair out. I’m not big on a lot of flair, but this felt like a good moment to have some. We could sort of make it a little more cinematic, to use that term. But it’s a Steadicam shot pushing in and following him home. And then we have all the players come in. That’s one of my favorite shots, just because there are so many moments that happen with all the different players as he comes in from the home run. It’s one of those things that, the more times you watch the shot, the more funny interactions you observe between all the players.

Carson Lund: Totally.

Alex Papaioannou: It’s magical.

Carson Lund: And we really didn’t want it to be a hard cut from slow motion back to regular 24 frames per second. So we actually speed ramp it all the way back to normal. I just wanted this very smooth viewing experience where you slip into a dream-like state in a very almost unnoticeable way. It’s just: suddenly you’re in it. I think a hard cut would feel too jarring in this context.

Alex Papaioannou: At the end of the day, this is also a film about guys hanging out. So I’m curious if either of you has a favorite hangout film, or one that you just throw on thinking, “I need this as a comfort watch right now.”

Carson Lund: Honestly, I don’t really have that kind of movie for myself. There are films I like, like Dazed and Confused, for example, that I just absolutely love. I very rarely turn on a film just to hang out now. I’m always watching something new or going to the movie theater. If a 35-millimeter print of Dazed and Confused is playing down the street for me, I’ll go watch it again. But I guess I’m always trying to discover something new in the movies, so I don’t necessarily have that sort of comfort thing. But I’m sure Greg does. I’m probably the outlier here.

Greg Tango: I mean, it’s not always my go-to, but it makes a nice story. Right before we shot Eephus on, I think the last day of prep, for whatever reason, I was by myself in one of the houses where we were staying. Nobody else was around, and I watched Everybody Wants Some!!, which is one of the things we referenced a little bit in pre-production. There are some baseball scenes in there, where people are practicing, but it’s Linklater, so they’re also just hanging out. That was a fun one to get myself in the headspace to work on a baseball movie for six weeks.

Carson Lund: I did see that three times in theaters! At least one of those viewings was just pure comfort. At first it was discovery, but then I was like, “I just got to go back.” Two Linklater answers. He is the master of that; he knows how to hang out.

“Fair of face and full of grace.” Emilie Blichfeldt on the ferocity of fairy tales

We all know that fairy tales aren’t real, right? That fairy godmothers don’t turn mice into footmen and pumpkins into carriages. That gingerbread and candy houses don’t exist deep within a forest for lost children to find. Or this kiss of one true love can break an enchantment from a wicked witch (or fairy) and usher in a happy-ever-after. Fairy tales might not be real, but they are certainly part of an oral tradition that would take aspects of people’s real lives and turn them into moral tales. No big bad wolf is coming to huff and puff and blow the house down – but it’s a good idea to use the best building materials possible to create a stable home. Bluebeard might not have locked his curious wives in a chamber and murdered them, but Gilles de Rais did torture children and historically existed, and he’s the model for Charles Perrault’s tale. Stranger danger becomes a wolf on the pathway to Granny’s house. Food shortages mean children are abandoned. Both maternal and infant mortality rates mean the “evil stepmother” exists.

There are versions of Cinderella, Aschenputtel, or Mossycoat (the titles alone would take an essay) reaching from Asia to Africa to the European tradition – the one we know best via Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers. The often-unnamed heroine (she only gets her name when she is made into a servant of the kitchen smut) resonates across continents and countries as an example of how true beauty and obeisance can never be eclipsed by falsity and trickery. The noble and gentle young woman will be found by her true love and saved from a life of drudgery. The proud and wicked stepsisters and stepmother might be forgiven (Perrault), or they might have to cut parts of their feet off and end up with their eyes pecked out by birds as punishment (The Grimm brothers).

Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren) imagines Cinderella from the perspective of one of the stepsisters who is as much, indeed more, a victim to the demands of a being a noble and gentle young woman who will attract the eye of the prince. Elvira is a bookish and awkward teen who is hauled in tow with her younger sister Alma to the house of minor aristocrats in Swedlandia where her mother, Rebekka is marrying a man she believes will raise them all out of poverty. When that doesn’t happen as planned, Elvira is pitched against Agnes (Cinderella) to be the fairest of all, leading Elvira down a terrible path of pain, delusion, starvation, and madness.

Nadine Whitney speaks to Blichfeldt about the horrors of beauty and how fairy tales are quite real: real enough that we believe in the moral coding that they have spun around our collective understanding.

Nadine Whitney: I love the way that you used a kind of indistinct 19th century. It has a Brontë Sisters Jane Eyre stylization at the beginning with the mid-century look and moves into a much later belle epoque style. So, you’ve got this stretched-out 19th century…

Emilie Blichfeldt: I love that you’re knowledgeable on this!

Nadine Whitney: Oh yes! The film is unanchored in time because it uses a fairy tale, but even more unanchored in time within its diegetic world because of the synth soundtrack and the visual references to Cinderellas across the ages. Angela Carter said there is no way to tell a folk or fairytale because the tale changes with each teller. You have remade Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, plus placing it into an everlasting context that points out the reality behind the fantasy.

Did you expect to get such a strong response from the film?

Emilie Blichfeldt: First of all, I just want to say, I love how you just you’ve just seen my film so beautifully, like all the delicate weaving I’ve done with the times and genres. So, thank you so much for that. But no, I didn’t expect the response. It’s totally overwhelming and also my dream scenario. I knew that in taking on the Cinderella story, there was a potential commercial aspect to it, in that it could speak to the whole world because it’s so well known. But I also knew that the body horror part of it could also make the film quite niche.

I hope that my way of creating it, tricking the audience into this fairy tale beauty and soft, feminine world and then twisting it slowly before it explodes in your face at the end, could be a way to kind of easing people into it. The Ugly Stepsister has been eight years in the making, and then, in the meantime, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance came out and was trailblazing. So, when I released my movie, everyone knew what body feministic body horror was, and they were like, “This is so cool. I want more!” And then my film is released, and I couldn’t dream of better timing.

Nadine Whitney: Your film is doing some great and very original things, but the feminist fairy tale in itself isn’t new. In a lot of ways, because women are so often at the center of fairy tales, either as protagonists: tricksters or victims, princesses or witches –it’s a genre where women tend to be more represented than men. We grow up with the “old wives’ tales,” and the fact that they’re called our old wives’ tales means that, whether real or imagined, it is women telling the stories.

The first book I was given on the day of my birth was a huge compendium of fairy tales that I still have. I couldn’t believe the cruelty of them. People cut off fingers and toes, and they dance in hot shoes; crows come and pick out their eyes for transgressions, and vipers and toads fall from the lips of “bad girls.”

What you’ve done in The Ugly Stepsister, beyond the body horror, is to boil down the Cinderella story to the economics of the female body. Rebekka (the ‘evil stepmother’ played by Ane Dahl Thorpe) and her daughters, Elvira (Lea Myren) and Alma (Flo Fagerli), only have their bodies to sell to survive.

What is happening with Elvira is that her mother is forcing her body into a state of being saleable, which is being marriageable. The obsession with beauty becomes all-consuming.

Emilie Blichfeldt: I knew very early that the mother-daughter relationship would be very central to the film. Because this is not only the way these ideals, as you say, are passed on from one generation to the other through our common cultural heritage, like the fairy tales, but also through mother-daughter, right?

So, you are trained to think of yourself in one way as a woman, and you start living that way, and you place your value in how you appear and appeal to others. It’s really hard to deconstruct that when mothers who have daughters want to make them in their own image somehow. And that the daughter also strives within this world that she learned to navigate as a woman where appearance has been a big part of womanhood.

I think that kind of everlasting cycle is also one of the reasons why we’re still stuck with body issues after thousands of years of being objects, right? We’ve been partially emancipated, but we’re still doing this dance, and it’s so hard to unravel because it’s so personal for every single woman, and it’s such a big part of our identity.

We are taught very early to self-objectify, and then if you start self-objectifying, it’s so hard to unlearn it because you’ve integrated with your identity. So, to stop doing that, or to stop putting your primary value in your looks, if you’ve invested a lot in them, is really, really hard and very, very vulnerable.

I also thought a lot about how we have this idea that Cinderella is a story about class, in the sense that we talk about the Cinderella story being like rags to riches, but really, in most of the European versions, she is a noble girl that is just put in the kitchen for some time before she marries the prince. The whole time, she has had nobility and a comfortable life. She had an upbringing with manners, education, and proper food. While the stepmother is a widowed woman with two children, and what does that actually, practically mean? That her body is her asset. I think that’s also present in so many of the versions. She’s often described as this vixen, this evil vixen, that’s like carrying herself with sex appeal or with a kind of sensuality, and it’s very looked down upon. But actually, it’s like, “Who can blame her? It’s her way of surviving, right?” But it’s so looked down upon, and that’s the real class role. You know, if you have no money, that’s the only way you go. Cinderella has so many other assets. She’s not poor with her perfect face.

Nadine Whitney: Your Cinderella, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), is not a maiden or virgin in your telling, which I think is great. You’ve taken the Charles Perrault version and knocked out the moral lesson at the end of the tale.

Emilie Blichfeldt: I thought that it was really shocking to me when I found out that she was having sex, but it also helped me to find my Cinderella. Because I still wanted her to have like a Cinderella quality as an archetype. For me, her archetype is this natural beauty, and she also has this natural way of being in life where nothing is really natural. Her emotions and her sexuality. She has no shame, you know, and that’s also what makes her free and beautiful. She is also kind of like an aspirational role model, right? I really love that for her, that she could still be a kind of a role model, but in a modern and real way. Not in the moralistic, just be nice and shut up.

I think so many “purified” versions of fairy tales leave out eroticism. I really wanted to put that in there to make them people of the flesh.

Nadine Whitney: Very much of the flesh! We can start talking about the horror aspects. I don’t think I’ve ever seen “eye cam” quite that way, with the POV being sewing through the eyelid, through the point of view of the eye. That was a lot!

I was just reading about plastic surgery in the 19th century, and I was also reading a book by Harper’s Bazaar called The Ugly Girl Papers, published in 1875, telling “self-identified” ugly women how to not be ugly. Beauty being a pain is far from something that we’ve come to learn only in the 20th century. It has been women’s duty to be beautiful and suffer for centuries.

Emilie Blichfeldt: That is also a very big part of the Chinese version of the fairy tale with foot binding. Chinese poetry says about the binding of women’s feet that if a woman has unbound feet, there is no way for a man to “know” where the woman has been. She can run around with people, and with unbound feet, she has to work. If you bind your feet, you don’t have to work. An unbound foot is like a broken piece of jewelry. It doesn’t have any value. Morality via “beauty” turns women into objects, and their job, their trajectory, is to become the perfect objects. I think that’s so creepy.

Nadine Whitney: One of the aspects of your story that I found very interesting is Alma hiding her menses from her mother because she knows as soon as anyone becomes aware that she is of bleeding / marriageable age, she will be forced into the corsets and starvation that Elvira is suffering through.

Emilie Blichfeldt: I love Alma, and she’s such an important character. When I was writing the script, I came to understand her role because I knew I wanted two stepsisters, but I didn’t want one just to follow the other. I thought hard about how I utilized her sisterhood. I thought about how the younger sister sees the older one and what she is going through in front of her. She gets a chance to kind of see what is happening before she’s a victim of it herself.

I saw her as the only sane character in this insane world. She’s the audience surrogate. You look at the film, and everyone’s crazy, desperate, or corrupt, but Alma sees. Alma is also a representation of me as well in the story. In the end, with Alma being the rescuer, I wanted Elvira to get the worm out, but I didn’t believe that she would be able to do that herself, or she would be emotionally thinking, “Oh, I didn’t get the prince. Now, let’s get this worm out,” as she’s so frenzied and lost by that point.

I thought, of course, Alma wants her sister to get the worm out. When I had that idea, I got quite emotional because I think there’s a beautiful and very important truth in surviving body dysmorphia. You really get affected by unreasonable beauty ideals and start objectifying yourself. It’s so hard to get out of that space because your thoughts, and your gaze on yourself, and on others is obsessive and unhealthy.

That’s what I myself have suffered from for a long time. And if it hadn’t been for the people around me who saw that I was suffering and who said, “Please, here’s my gaze. Here is how you really are. You know this is, this is not okay. You know, the things that you’re seeing or believing are total bullshit.” If it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t have gotten out. It’s almost impossible to get out of that by yourself. And I think that’s just so powerful because when you suffer from things like that, you feel so lonely. You think that you’re the one to blame. It’s some kind of personal secret, a private thing. But actually, it’s something we have to deal with together and really talk about more publicly.

There is a big industry that’s earning a lot of money from us and pushing women into those unhealthy spaces. And we have to help each other get out from that mindset.

Nadine Whitney: Khloe Kardashian said that she wanted to take a tapeworm at one point. Part of one of the most famously aspirationally rich and beautiful families in the world was talking about ingesting tapeworms, which is insane.

Emilie Blichfeldt: It’s insane. I don’t know what to say to that. Actually, I try not to think too much about that because then I get very overwhelmed, and then whatever happens with my movie feels like a drop in the ocean. I know you can’t save the world in a day. I’m trying to nudge the narrative or at least present another narrative.

It’s also very important for me to say that I don’t judge anyone trying to navigate that space of “how to be a woman.” It’s so such a hard, hard space to navigate. I don’t judge anyone for the choices they make in that space. But I think we have to dare to go into that space and talk about how we are influenced, how we are influencing each other, and how we can try to make that space a freer one.

Nadine Whitney: Hopefully, we can all be Almas for the Elviras and write new fairy tales where the one true love is a firm, supported, and healthy sense of self.