The Tribeca Film Festival,
which runs from April 15–26 this year, features a lineup which, like the city
itself, can be all things to all people to an almost daunting degree. Beyond
the corporate money and celebrity flash in the top-billed panels and special
events this year, the eclectic programming of Tribeca’s humbler precincts has,
also like the city, become a reliably supportive showcase, in particular, for
young, local artistic talent—including a number of a familiar faces from the
city’s independent film scene.
One such face is Kate Lyn
Sheil, the microindie muse-turned-House of Cards supporting player-turned-who
knows what next, who appears as a Southern belle at a ball in Men Go to Battle,
playing in Tribeca’s World Narrative Competition. Sheil wrote the film with
director Zachary Treitz, who makes his feature debut with a story of two
brothers, Henry and Francis Mellon, scuffling farmers in Kentucky in the first
year of the Civil War. Though Henry, the more inward of the two, braces at
Francis’s rash decision-making and poor task management skills, it’s he who
gets drunk, humiliates himself with a bookish, middle-class potential
sweetheart played by Rachel Korine, and runs off to join the Union army.
Despite its archetypal story and familiar historical milieu, the film takes
nothing for granted, rediscovering the base interactions—physical, social,
economic, emotional—at the heart of everyday life, and sustaining a tone of
intimacy.
Sheil and Treitz are a couple,
and according to Sheil, worked together on outline for the film, and then took
turns writing individual scenes, and revising the other’s scenes; when not
fulfilling her responsibilities as a producer, Sheil was on set “helping with
blocking, giving notes and that sort of thing as well.” The two filmmakers, who
live in Chinatown, answered a few questions of mine over email. (For much more
Tribeca coverage, see thelmagazine.com throughout the festival.)
1.
One thing that struck me
about the film was how detached the characters seem to be from what we might
today consider the arc of history, despite the Civil War setting.
Francis and Henry are illiterate; aside from a book another character is seen
to read, and a prop issue of Harper’s Weekly, there’s very little connection to
any kind of wider culture, and aside from a number of folk songs which the
characters sing, and a single daguerreotype portrait, no real interaction with
any kind of recorded history. Did this make the characters feel closer, or
further away from you, as you were writing the film and conjuring them into
existence?
2.
Sheil: The movie is set against the backdrop of
an encroaching Civil War but we did our best to make it an immersive experience
about the lives of these two isolated, self-obsessed, ignorant brothers. I
think with historical fiction we have a tendency to make heroes or villains of
the characters and that tendency serves its purpose but it’s a little dangerous
because it gives them an untouchable quality. I wanted to explore the weakness,
the casual destructiveness and lack of engagement of these two men because,
yes, that does make them feel closer to me. I wanted to take a look at two
flawed, bumbling idiots during a time when tidal shifts were happening in
American history. I have a great deal of love for them but they also at spurts
depress and disturb me. We specifically set the movie during the first year of
a war that would last for nearly five. We didn’t want any of the characters to
have prescience of any kind.
3.
Treitz: I feel close to the main two characters,
Henry and Francis Mellon. They have traits and sensitivities I can identify
with, but they were also specifically written for the two people playing the
parts. It would be hard to care or write about characters with whom you have no
sympathies, but the Mellon brothers are both exaggerations of qualities that
Kate and I wanted to focus on. The setting of the story helped us distance ourselves,
as well as the research we did into unpublished firsthand accounts from this
time and place. We wanted the characters to feel like they are firmly rooted in
the world we wanted to create and capture, which is this small town in rural
Kentucky in 1861 where the war is slowly encroaching. We tried to be as
painfully literal and specific with our location and timeline as possible. The
story takes place over the first year of the war, and very few people at the
time – at least in our reading from the voices who were there and experienced
it—thought it would last as long as it did, or become as brutal as it was. So
we tried to tell the story from the eyes of the characters as they would see
it. The Mellon brothers, at least at first, are not engaged with the politics
or events outside of their farm. But when they venture into the wider world,
politics and current events are in the conversations of the people all around
them. We liked the idea that the world around the brothers is increasingly on
edge, and that no one knows what is to come. Henry and Francis are relatively
uneducated, so we imagined that their experiences with outside culture come
from the songs they have heard, the people they talk to in town, and maybe some
traveling theater they might have seen when they were younger. Songs had a
different and I think greater significance to everyday life at that time, and
singing was a more public form of expression. Songs were little snippets of
information that were easily transportable and easily remembered. This takes on
a new significance as the Civil War brought groups of people from all parts of
the country and even the world together, and later in the film you see this
transmission and even perversion of popular songs from all over. For the Small
family, who are worldly and educated for that region, their cultural palette is
different. They are highly literate, they own a piano (which was a big deal),
and the songs we hear them sing are either popular chamber music from the time
or more political and current “pop” songs of the day. We worked with a
brilliant musicologist, Nikos Pappas, who had just finished a project on
popular dance music from the mid-1800s and he selected and arranged these songs
written by mostly forgotten Kentucky composers, which were based on popular
romantic and classical music. And of course it was all centered around dancing,
which is its own cultural, social, and sexual ball of yarn. The recorded
history is ingrained in as many parts of the story as possible, but hopefully
it’s so deeply buried within the specific story and environment that it does
not stand out and shout at you. The culture, the politics, the social
stratification, they’re built into the everyday discourse, fashion, and
actions, just as they are today. We wanted to level the big and small events so
that they all fit together. This makes it more entertaining to experience, at
least for me.
4.
Did you do much research
into the time period in order to figure out how to stage social interactions
and customs, get speech patterns down? Or for any other purposes?
5.
Treitz: The axiom is “write what you know,” and
on an emotional level with the characters that’s where we started, but one of
the adventures of this film was the challenge of writing what we didn’t know. For
us that meant trying to dig into the conversational and social palette of the
time, so we spent a fair amount of energy exploring unpublished diaries and
journals from a few different archives. There is an especially strong
collection in Louisville at the Filson Historical Society that we mined for
unpublished firsthand accounts. We went through a lot of diaries from teenage
girls, letters home from soldiers, remembered sermons, sheet music, and random
scraps of paper, like what some guy spent on a horse that day. This gave us a
whole wealth of material and ideas for the language, and pushed us further into
the quotidian treatment of our story. We would read whole pages of a girl’s
diary devoted to the visitors of their house, what they were wearing, who she
is courting, and the weather—so much about the weather—and that was followed up
by one sentence about a pivotal battle that had happened nearby. We got a sense
of how evenly people take major and minor things in life. Sometimes a fight
with your sister is more important to you than the war raging outside. The
language in the script and in the performances was chosen so that nothing would
feel superimposed, so that we’re not winking to the camera from the present
day. Manners and style of the time were even more different from now than
language. Our devotion to the research had less to do with being historically
accurate and more to do with creating a framework that serviced the story and
characters. We don’t pretend to be historians. Every detail we used from a
source was one fewer that we had to invent, and the sum total was about
creating the illusion of being in another time and place without it feeling
strange. We wanted the characters and even the world offscreen to feel alive,
and the research provided us with a rich texture more than anything else, which
happens to be visually and intellectually stimulating.
6.
A question for Kate Lyn
Sheil: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this is your first credit as a
writer (though I know you’ve improvised scenes and dialogue at various
points in your career). I’m curious about that—especially because the main
female role in the film is played by another actor, Rachel Korine. How is it
different, writing for other performers? When you’re setting down words for
other people to say, does your own experience interpreting characters help you
to bring characters to life on the page, or do you have to stop yourself from
writing the character as you would play it?
7.
Sheil: This is the first of this nature, I
think. I don’t have much of an interest in writing for myself. I’ve only got
one life and one brain so, yes, I was mining some of the same territory in
writing this as I have in acting but there was also a lot of research involved,
a lot of first hand accounts, diaries and letters, that were drawn from to help
create the characters. I love actors. I love watching them work, so writing
material for other people to perform was a pleasure. There were moments when I
would think we had written a scene that was difficult and fun to play, and then
feel a kind of elated relief that I wasn’t the person who was going to have to
do it. We were so lucky to have Rachel. She seemed to find the character and
tone and to make it her own so effortlessly. She’s an amazing actress.
8.
For that matter, does it
change anything as an actor to be playing in scenes that you wrote, in a movie
you’re producing? Or have you always approached scenes with a conception
of your character’s role in the overall construction of the film?
9.
Sheil: I mean, yes, I was probably far more
aware of the utilitarian purpose that my character served in this movie than I
have been in others. There were periods of time during the writing of the
script when we had included a lot more material with the Small family which we
later cut out in favor of focusing more heavily on the brothers, but because of
all those deleted scenes I felt, as an actor, like I had secrets, which was
nice. But, normally when I act I want (don’t ask for or get but want) take
after take and in this, I knew when we had accomplished the task. Less ego
maybe. The part is very small and I was more excited to watch other actors do
their thing.
10.
I was struck by the
visual language of the film, which seems to line up with contemporary modes of
American independent realism: a handheld camera; and the use of strictly
natural sources to light scenes (though I suppose the frequent low-light
situations are also evocative of a pre-electric past). Would you say you were
searching for a “neutral” aesthetic for a story set 150 years ago—or that you
sought out a visual scheme that would rhyme with our sense of how the past looked
(which is really more a sense of how the past was photographed)? Or a bit of
both?
11.
Treitz: We spent a lot of time debating,
preparing, and refining the look of the film. For us that did not mean
pondering over the perfect composition. It was more about the interaction of
the camera with the actors. We wanted a visceral closeness to the actors and to
do this we needed to be able to move around with them in the spaces. Much of
the story takes place at night, so it was an endless challenge to get the right
amount and quality of light. When you’re filming at night way out in some cabin
that has no electricity, the fact that everything is supposed to be candlelit
becomes an asset (at least visually… comfort-wise it was freezing cold unless
you were right on top of the fire). But the lighting is deliberately stylized.
Just because you’re using candles does not mean it is “natural” in the
aesthetic sense. Brett, our cinematographer, created these candle panels that
we could mount anywhere inside the cabin to amplify the firelight and give it
the necessary illumination and softness. We burned through a lot of candles.
The floors were covered in wax by the time we were done. Since the story takes
place in pre-electric times, there were fewer illusions to hide behind. We
couldn’t pretend there was a nearby streetlight, or unseen electric signage. We
were left with the basics: sun, moon, fire. But rarely was the lighting natural
by any means, because of the properties of photography and the aesthetics we
had in mind. Outside at night we used big lights. There is nothing natural
about the Arri M40 HMI. When you’re near it it’s like standing next to the sun.
We had at most a two-man lighting crew so the throughline with other
independent films is just being as resourceful as possible to produce the
desired effect. The exception is the battle reenactment scenes, where we had no
control over the lighting except for telling everyone to get painfully close to
the fire at night. We didn’t want sweeping tracking shots or to pornographize
the scenery. We were often in really stunningly beautiful locations, and turned
our back on the “perfect” frame in favor of the one that served the characters
and the story. And to me this makes the footage so much more beautiful.
12.
In terms of production
design, it’s kind of funny to see bushy beards and straight razors and work
shirts and suspenders restored to a 19th century context, but given that
this must have been a pretty low-budget film, I’m curious about how you create
a period atmosphere without slipping into feeling like you’re playing
Frontierland dress-up, a doing the kind of micro-indie genre movie that’s more
like a genre-movie re-enactment, where you’re trying less to suspend disbelief
than to create this meta-discourse about the fictionality of art-making and
history and life and whatever (to be clear, I really like a lot of these
movies, like Impolex and Wild Canaries). What were the discussions you had
about creating the Civil War environment in the production design; and what if
anything did you do on set to keep everyone rooted in the past?
13.
Treitz: I love period pieces of all shapes and
sizes, but we were trying to avoid the uncanniness of many period pieces
without giving in to the irony of making it all a joke. It would have been a
lot easier to tear open the artifice and pretend that is contributing to a
discourse on the creative process or something like that. That would be the
cool thing to do. Fuck that. We went for sincerity. There is a healthy amount
of levity and absurdity in the characters and their situations, but its not
self-referential irony. We talked a lot about the PBS look and how to avoid it,
and it’s an elusive alchemy. It was a line we walked from the writing to the
acting to the camerawork to the production design and into the sound design.
Any time we looked at something and thought “old timey,” it had to go. For
Jacob Heustis, our production designer, the basic formula for success was
making everything feel new—the buildings at that time would be new with fresh
paint, the ladies would be in the latest fashions—while keeping everything
dirty. Dirt was a verb. Everything got dirted. We dirted the roads, we dirted
the store, we dirted the actors. Peter Watkins’s Edvard Munch was a beacon of
dirtiness and roughness in a period piece. You watch that movie and you feel
like his sister is going to spit blood on your shoes.
14.
Did the shape of the
film change a lot in the editing, versus what was on the page? I’m curious if
the somewhat oblique plotting was something you set out for in the
writing, or something you found in production and postproduction?
15.
Treitz: When we were writing, we wanted it to
feel like we were dropping in and out of these characters’ lives. Expository
dialogue was the enemy. The story should tell itself, rather than the
characters having to drag it along. We wanted the edges to be jagged and sharp.
When we shot it, we left out any establishing shots so that on a scene-to-scene
basis, the audience was starting in medias res. There are so many visual cues
in the shots (in the lighting, the location, the characters, the clothes), it
felt like we could stand to lose some of the baggage of narrative filmmaking in
favor of a more alert and caustic stance. So by the style of the storytelling,
we gave ourselves room in the editing to change the flow of events and the
dynamics between characters when we found a new or more powerful combination. The
story didn’t change, but as in any movie, characters and events were emphasized
or cut out, relationships between characters were altered or enhanced. We liked
the idea that the film could follow any character we see and he or she would
have their own interesting story to tell, and in the final film you can see a
fair amount of characters who seem important for a minute and are never seen
afterwards. But there were many more moments and characters we loved because they
ultimately weren’t serving the greater good of the narrative.
16.
The plot charting the
rising and falling fortunes of the brother who goes to war, and the brother who
stays home, is pretty classic. I’m curious about what you felt was worth
revisiting about this story, what you felt you could bring to it?
17.
Sheil: I wanted to engage with film history and
play with a somewhat familiar framework but strip its main characters of any
sort of heroism. I was curious to see what it would look like if you took the
sweeping landscape of that period in American history and within that told a
very suffocating story about two people who are not admirable, who exhibit some
of the traits and tendencies that I fear in myself, carelessness, laziness,
lack of engagement—things that the protagonists of many postmodern stories have
grappled with but to see what that looked when it was couched in an epic
setting. I wanted to create a feeling for the fragility, the loneliness and the
failings of these two men through an exploration of the details of their lives.
Maybe I wanted to create an expectation and then dash it. But it’s a brother
story, yeah. Either it works for you or it doesn’t.
18.
Treitz: I never felt like we were operating in
overcrowded territory because so much of the dynamic between Henry and Francis
came from my own experiences and knowing the actors playing them, who felt like
brothers. If I had to pick a “classic” relation to the plot, it would be an
inverted Cinderella story where the abused stepchild goes to the ball and
everything goes to hell.
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