Micro-budgeted and entirely self-financed projects by a critic and director with a day job in IT, the films of Dan Sallitt feel light years away from anything currently produced in the United States. And the dissonance owes as much to their shoestring means as to the emotional wealth they harbor. To be treading into Sallitt’s luminous cinema—a body of work that so far spans five features and one short, Caterina, his latest project—is to wade into a universe dotted with psychologically complex characters grappling with unfulfilled desires and shape-shifting relationships.
It’s a world that feels curiously domestic in scope, pivoting as it often does on character studies and couples’ portraits, like the L.A.-stranded protagonists of Sallitt’s 1986 debut Polly Perverse Strikes Again!, the best friends turned newlyweds in Honeymoon (1998), the two estranged sisters in All The Ships at Sea (2004), or the other sibling duo at the center of The Unspeakable Act (2012), wherein Tallie Medel plays a 17-year-old coming to terms with her incestuous desire for her older brother.
But if the interest in these intimate two-handers may have something to do with their modest finances, calling Sallitt’s films small-scale seems both unfair and inaccurate. Underpinning all of them are tempestuous and unhinged emotions, but these dramatic urges are always and everywhere reined by a minimalist aesthetic—comprising largely of static shots and long takes—and a realism anchored in dialogue-heavy exchanges (“People in my films talk constantly,” Sallitt told Kinoscope, “not because I have plenty to say to the audience, but because people talk a lot in life”). It’s a beguilingly simple dance between the fictional and the documentary aspects of cinema that’s earned him plenty of comparisons with the films of Éric Rohmer—an affinity Sallitt has spoken about at length in the past.
Nowhere does the tension between romanticism and realism feel more palpable than in Fourteen, Sallitt’s lacerating new feature. In it, Tallie Medel returns as Mara, and Norma Kuhling plays Jo. Twenty-somethings headquartered in Brooklyn, they’ve been best friends since childhood, but now the bond is getting more evanescent, and Fourteen traces an elliptical and devastating chronicle of that subtle, invisible erosion, made all the more tragic by Jo’s history of mental illness and drug abuse. And yet Sallitt never slips into facile sentimentalism. As with its predecessors, the power of Fourteen resides in its clear-eyed telling. It’s the film’s brutal honesty that makes it so heart-wrenchingly vivid, a fine-grained ode to friendship that ends on an affecting note: sometimes the beauty and mystery of our strongest bonds can outlive us.
What follows is a condensed version of a chat that began at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, where Fourteen screened in November last year, and stretched over the months that followed, over coffee and quarantined Skype calls.
NOTEBOOK: I was intrigued by something you said after Fourteen screened in Thessaloniki. Apparently you wrote the film backwards: the final scene was the first you conceived. I was wondering whether that applies to your work at large, whether you tend to start from one particular scene and let things emerge and grow organically out of it.
DAN SALLITT: I think it always works that way, somehow. But it doesn’t need to follow this or that particular order. In the case of Fourteen, I had a loose idea: I had a scene I wanted to arrive at along the way, which was an emotional breakdown. But I didn’t have a movie until I thought about that ending. In that very first plan that scene was concrete, the rest was vague. But it’s not always that way. Sometimes your film may begin with the last scene, sometimes it may be something in the middle, sometimes the inspiration may not even come from an individual scene, but from a character. In the case of The Unspeakable Act, I was just so taken by Tallie Medel’s Jackie. She’s this existentialist heroine who doesn’t care at all about how society will judge her desire. She knows about the problem, she is practical about it, but she’s not affected by it.
NOTEBOOK: She says it herself: she’s an “evolutionary fuck-up.”
SALLITT: [Laughs] She is! The whole premise of the film is quite extraordinary, if you think about it. There’s a big splash of romanticism in it that drove me. And that romanticism is something I see in all my movies. I think there’s a large romantic urge in me that expresses itself under the surface of my films, in some very unusual ways. And then there’s the artist side of me, who must moderate that urge, and square it with the mundane. Which is why my films tend to have an everyday life quality, a Rohmerian realism counterpoised against these large emotions. I think part of me wants this big thing writ large in the world, but at the same time, I’m too embarrassed to go all the way. I wouldn’t want to make movies where those feelings are just so large, out there, in your face, so to speak. And so I deploy all the realistic tools I know to create a surface of reality to work against that.
NOTEBOOK: There’s also a certain literary quality about The Unspeakable Act, which I guess comes from your recurrent use of the voiceover in the film, and gives it this sort of journal-entry aura. But in Fourteen, you don’t have that at all. It’s a far more elliptical work, with fewer clues, perhaps.
SALLITT: That’s a really interesting point. I think there’s a general assumption anytime you watch someone else’s movies that they must have a penchant for this or that storytelling device. And you see that in interviews, too, when you read directors go, “Oh, I love dissolves…” or, “I hate tracking shots,” and so on. But in fact, if one has a fairly catholic point of view, then these things are just tools rather than means of self-expression. In the case of The Unspeakable Act, I think the voiceover is really necessary because a lot of the film’s power comes from this tension between Jackie’s everydayness, and something about her that remains mysterious. And the voiceover offers a means to make those two elements collide forcefully. That’s the only reason I used it. I didn’t try to make it consistent, or universal. And if you listen closely you’ll notice that sometimes the voiceover seems to capture those events right as they happen, and sometimes it seems to reflect on them from the future. In the case of Fourteen, that perspective was absent, so the film required a different approach. All The Ships at Sea has a flashback at the end, and I’d never used flashbacks before. But there it was absolutely necessary, and I couldn’t make it a film until I was able to do that. Because the drama happened inside the character, and I needed a structure in which I could make the drama manifest itself through what the character said. I chose flashbacks not because I loved the technique, but because I needed to.
Above: Kuhling, left, with Sallitt and Medel on the set of Fourteen
NOTEBOOK: You’re pointing at a certain heterogeneity in your storytelling, but I was wondering if you could say the same about your aesthetics. Watching your films, one finds a certain continuum in the visual grammar: you have a certain penchant for static shots, long takes, et cetera.
SALLITT: I think you’re right. Filming to me is pragmatic, and I tend to use pragmatic things. For instance, in Fourteen there is something I do very rarely, and I didn’t plan to do: I moved the camera without anybody motivating it. I don’t know if you remember the shot. It’s toward the very end, when Mara gets that final phone call, and the camera starts with her little daughter, and then pans slowly to Tallie and the rest of the kitchen. I didn’t plan it that way, because I’d storyboarded it with a different location in mind. But when I found myself in that room, that seemed the only way I could get things done, so I wound up with an autonomous camera move, which I don’t believe there are many of in my movies.
But on the whole, there’s a certain minimalism in my approach. I think it’s just a personality trait of my filmmaking. I feel as though your script, your ideas, your characters, whatever it is that you’re trying to express, is something to be obeyed, something you must serve. And I don’t like the feeling of self-assertion. I don’t like the idea of saying, “OK, I’m going to put the camera in a funny place, or in this or that way.” I like the idea that I’m trying to serve an artistic concept as best as I can. Which leads me to a minimal use of means. I wouldn’t like it if someone were to tell me, “Oh, that thing you did was flashy.”
NOTEBOOK: I don’t think it’s anything flashy, but I was thinking of that shot half way through Fourteen where we see Mara walk out of the train station toward Jo’s childhood home. It’s all a single take, the camera placed at a high angle, and I think the whole segment—the train arriving, Tallie Medel leaving the station—spans four minutes.
SALLITT: Oh yeah.
NOTEBOOK: How did that shot come into being?
SALLITT: It was always into being. As soon as I thought about that part of the story, the fact that something would happen to Jo in the middle of the film, and it’d involve going upstate, and Tallie getting there by train, I never doubted I would do it that way. There was just nothing to cut there. The question was one of duration. And if I went for that length that’s because I find the whole action of the train beautiful and comprehensive. You have to start from far away: the train comes to the station, people get off and come into town...
NOTEBOOK: But there’s also a sense of threat, in the stillness, and then the noise.
SALLITT: There’s an ominous feeling, yes. I hope it’ll instill the suspicion that something’s different. Something’s happened. And then Tallie is picked out by the camera. I cried a little bit when I was shooting that. It was such a beautiful thing to me: you see the camera that picks her up ever so slightly as soon as she gets to the right place in the frame, and you realize from the walk that it is her. But that was always there. I was bragging on the set that I was going to stop the film for four minutes, right there. And I loved it when it was done. It may not work for everyone, and some people advised me to cut it down. But I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I did. I’d rather lose some viewers than deal on my death bed with the regret for not putting that shot in. I guess that in some ways honoring your commitment to your original concept, to the feeling that made you love it in the first place, is more important than the result.
NOTEBOOK: Do you see a relationship between your minimalist aesthetic and your writing style? Would you say the two mirror each other, to some degree?
SALLITT: Interesting. It’s hard to answer that. Scripts tend to take me a while. In the case of Fourteen, the script was finished in late 2017: I had the idea as early as the middle of 2012, but didn’t start writing until well after. I took some notes, arranged them in order, and began from there. But when I write I don’t usually think about how I’m going to film those scenes. And I think that this is good, in a way, because if I did the risk is that the découpage would get in the way of the dialogues. And in theory, you want the découpage to be a response to something you capture of reality. Because when you’re writing a script, you’re wanting to recreate reality, to some extent.
NOTEBOOK: On that note, I think your dialogues may have changed over the years. Watching your first works, I think there’s a certain abstract quality to the dialogues, which has completely vanished in Fourteen, where the conversations feel a lot more natural, almost unscripted.
SALLITT: I got a lot of comments like that for my earlier films, on the abstract and artificial nature of my dialogues. But I never recognized that. I was always just trying to write what people would say, the way they’d chat. I guess a certain degree of abstraction would still creep in, somehow. I think the difference with my more recent films may have to do with the actors I’m working with at the moment. Tallie and Norma have a particular way of delivering dialogue that makes it feel improvised. And people have told me sometimes they feel the dialogue in Fourteen is improvised. Which is crazy, because I don’t do that, usually. So I think it may have to do with the acting style, too. Norma especially has this kind of knack for delivering dialogues so it looks as though she’s just thinking of it on the spur of the moment.
NOTEBOOK: So how much time and effort did you put into establishing that chemistry between your two leads?
SALLITT: Well, it’s very nice to write for actors, but in this case I wrote for Tallie, not for Norma. I’d written for Kate Lyn Sheil as the original Jo. But she turned down the role. And then I cast Hannah Gross, who was then cast by David Fincher in Mindhunter, and this made her schedule look uncertain. So I didn’t write for Norma, specifically. And I also didn’t sweat over the dialogues in that way. I never went, “OK, how can I make this sound real?” I mean, I’ve been doing this for a while so hopefully conversations by now should come to you having already passed some checks in terms of whether or not it’s the way people really talk.
NOTEBOOK: We mentioned Norma Kuhling, but how did your work with Tallie Medel begin?
SALLITT: Tallie Medel was recommended to me by Joe Swanberg, when I was casting for The Unspeakable Act. I had no people of her age in mind, and so I asked around for recommendations. Joe gave four: Tallie was one of them. When we first met I remember she was somewhat guarded, but when I saw clips of her in another project by Daniel Scheinert, a kind of web series that was this semi-documentary version of the lives of Tallie and her friends [Everything a Monster Is Not, 2010], there was a scene she was in that convinced me, immediately, that she was the right person to play that character.
NOTEBOOK: Do you remember what it was about that scene that convinced you?
SALLITT: You could tell, instantly, that she existed in a very plausible way in front of the camera. That there was something about her existence that made it more plausible than ours, than anybody else’s. In the scene she gets a phone call by this dear friend of hers, who’s getting into town. And she’s extremely excited, so excited you can see a little gloss of a tear in her eyes. It was immediately clear to me that she had a gift for existing in a very pure way.
NOTEBOOK: I’m curious to hear more about your relationship with film criticism. You worked as a full-time film critic at the Los Angeles Reader in the mid 1980s, so in a sense you were a critic before you became a filmmaker. But even after you quit your job in L.A. to move back East, you continued to write about films—and your website is a clear testament to your cinephilia (as well as one of the first to employ those color-coded film rankings). How have those two pursuits, filmmaking and criticism, developed through time?
SALLITT: It’s all been very much organic, and I think they grew together. I started watching movies very avidly when I was 17, and by the time I was 19 I decided I was going to be a filmmaker. That was always the goal. I knew that just being a critic wasn’t going to be enough for me, for whatever internal ambitions I had. But writing about the movies I see and analyzing them has always been a part of who I am. And I think that loving other people’s movies is central to my love of making them. I can’t separate those things. I wouldn’t bother making films if I didn’t feel great love for other people’s. You do hear some filmmakers every now and then going, “Oh, I stopped watching movies, I gotta stay in my own head space.” And that’s great. Whatever works for you. But that’s the furthest thing from my mind. I can’t imagine, ever, giving up the pleasure of discovering other people’s cinema, and I can’t see that pleasure as being completely different from having made a movie, and put it into film history.
NOTEBOOK: I was wondering how, as a critic and filmmaker, you deal with criticism of your own work. Do you read reviews of your films?
SALLITT: I do, yeah. But I don’t incorporate criticism too much. That would be a little… risky. I’m pretty happy with the criticism I receive, usually, even if I don’t agree with it. And I don’t mind if someone pans my film, I think that’s fine. I don’t need people to like my movies—it’s nice if a few people do. But to actually incorporate it—that would be too much, I think. If you wanted to have a place in the world I guess you’d have to pay attention to the world, and see why you’re not getting your place in it. But I don’t think I’m going to have a place in the world in that sense. I may end up with a small place in the critical world, and I hope I may have a footnote in film history, somewhere - I do want that. But I don’t need more than I already have to try to achieve that. I feel like I have a sense of what I want film history to be. And if the world starts going in different directions—which it does, all the time—I don’t think I’ll necessarily want to learn from that.