That structure, both in writing and editing, relies on shifts in format, such as through the ’90s miniDV camcorder footage that Sophie and Calum shoot on holiday. What can you say about the role of miniDV in this film?
It came out of thinking really hard about point of view, which was something I thought about midway through, while working through the idea of how I would outline this. Point of view became really complicated, and it took a long time to wrap my head around. I feel like I only wrapped my head fully around it by the time we got to set, because of the extensive conversations I had with my cinematographer, Gregory Oke, about how we were going to shoot.
What I loved about the miniDV, when I introduced it, was that it gave a very direct, literal point of view tool from one character to another, and it also offered the opportunity for playback within the film. Calum, for example, could see through her eyes, her perception of him. There’s that scene where she shoots him with his arm hanging out of the shower, because it’s broken and he can’t get it wet. And she’s goofing around and saying, “This is my wonderful, one-armed father.” He watches it back and takes solace in that in one scene, then finds it too difficult to watch in another. It was this fascinating, complicating tool.
I also loved it as an anchor of what happened, the facts, and everything around it is imagined or remembered or some combination of the two. This is what happened on the holiday, to some degree. And most of it’s quite banal, and I love that too. Finding transitions in and out of it was a lot of work. In the edit, I think the DV scenes were moved more than the rave scenes, probably. The rave scenes moved, and we were very conscientious about where they were placed. Because we had both DV that was written and also some wild-card DV we had shot, there was actually a lot of opportunity to throw it in different parts of the timeline. It was an interesting and challenging element in the edit.
Watching “Aftersun,” there’s this e.e. cummings poem that came to mind: “Love is more thicker than regret, more thinner than recall.” In evoking the sensation of memory, you find this balance between sharp pangs of melancholy and the endurance of love between these characters.
That was what the whole film was about, to me. Greg was very vigilant of that on set. It’s very easy for me to capture the melancholy, but it doesn’t work unless you have the joy and the love between them. It is so essential, but sometimes it was easy to forget that. Greg was on top of me all the time about making sure that we had enough. And I wish we had more, even still, of those scenes where you really see the warmth and joy. The love is there, but I think what I wish maybe there were a little more of is the fun between them.
For me, it took a long time for me to articulate the answer to my most dreaded question: what do you want an audience to feel at the end of the film? It’s not a question I ever have interest in answering, however frequently I had to. There was one point, before we made the film, that I did answer that question, and it was actually illuminating for me. The film is about grief and loss, but it is about that not diminishing what they had, the love that did exist between them.
There’s two scenes where you hear a baby off-screen. It’s very deliberate that, in the first, that baby is crying; in the second, the baby is not. The film ends not with the sound of a screaming baby and a new parent who doesn’t stand up, but with a more neutral feeling of there being a new life here. What ultimately she had with her father will carry across to her own experiences of being a parent. I say the film is about grief, but it is more than that about the love between these two characters.
The fuzziness of early digital video, it’s blurring of motion and artifacting into pixels, has such a ghostly element to it; characters are only partially preserved through this format. How did filming your actors through these different formats influence your sense of this story?
This is where we began to understand point of view. Adult Sophie is the overarching point of view of the film. It is absolute, in the sense that it is primary, but there are secondary points of view beneath it. One of those is Sophie as a kid, and those tend to be close shots, details of people. That was trying to get at the sense of remembering individual parts of someone. I think of my grandmother, for example, and I think of her hands. It was trying to capture that idea of details, whether it’s like an earring or a hand or a shoulder.
Adult Sophie, on top of that, is remembering these images and trying to piece these people and scenes back together. And then you had the scenes of Calum alone, and the way we determined to create some feeling of that primary point of view, of adult Sophie, was to shoot them more abstracted, either through reflections, with more physical distance than we were otherwise shooting, or obstructed from view, whether that’s behind a wall or whatever else. That was not something we expected people to consciously perceive — “Oh, this is her imagining what he might have been doing when he’s alone” — but that was the intention.
Our hope, always, on this film, was that these things would accumulate over the course of the film. You’re never going to see a scene and immediately think, “Oh, this is from adult Sophie’s point of view,” because you don’t really know that, or have certainty of that, until much later. But that was our line of thinking on how we would shoot. There’s young Sophie’s direct point of view, adult Sophie’s remembering of Calum, and then you have this more conventional view of them on holiday together, where it’s a little bit more of a camera capturing a scene. And then you have the DV, which is different people’s direct point of view at different points in time.
Technology has evolved, as well, since the days of miniDV. Today, people record their lives constantly, in these crisp digital images. It’s so different. What do you feel we’ve lost in this shift toward higher quality in video recording?
It’s totally different. And it depends on what captured your own childhood memories, you know? Was it a photograph? Was it Super 8? Was it Hi8? Was it something else? For me, and for many of the people who worked on this film, that was miniDV, and miniDV has a really specific aesthetic. It has a really specific color palette, frame rate, and feel. And I think it just captures an immediate feeling.
It doesn’t do that for everyone, you know. There are other people that I’ve met who are like, “That footage is intolerable, and it makes me feel like throwing up in the movie theater,” because it’s so shaky and close. And so I think that is something that people have different experiences of, but I think it’s beautiful. Sometimes, we joke that we wish we’d shot the whole film on it. The scene where he’s capturing her asleep, and it’s very low light, the camera’s on this weird night mode, and there’s this incredible, latticed pattern on the screen. He puts the camera down, and it’s just pointing into the sheet, and it’s this pink texture. We reshot it with 35mm, so you have the grain of 35mm, on top of this weird digital noise. I would have played that shot for three minutes.
There’s a shot in your short film, “Tuesday,” of a needle moving through a sweater, of the significance of mending fabric; in “Aftersun,” too, you suggest emotional volumes within physical objects that a viewer would not initially comprehend.
Thank you. That was the first shot in the first film I ever made. I don’t know that I over-thought too much in that film, in a lot of ways. I saw a lot more after the fact.
That’s fitting. As a last question, I wanted to ask about that final rave scene, with Paul Mescal’s character exiting through a door, and your decision to soundtrack it with one of my favorite needle drops of the year.
For the last shot, I didn’t give him that much direction. That scene was the last thing we shot, really. There were a few pick-ups, but that was the last real scene we shot, right before we shot the actual rave sequence that afternoon. And by that point, I think we both knew the character so well, and we understood where we were going.
“Under Pressure” came in the edit. It was a surprise, an accidental discovery. When I brought it into the edit one night, I don’t know why I did it. Sometimes, we’d bring things in almost as a joke, to make each other laugh. I dropped it on the timeline over our temp music, and I hit play, and it wasn’t that funny. It just worked. And it especially wasn’t funny because we then had to clear it. But our music supervisor pulled it off.
It just worked. It’s just one of those things. It wasn’t planned. I was just messing around and stumbled across it. It’s so literal and outrageous and a capital-C choice, as it was once described to me, but I think it works. When you avoid exposition and cliché to the degree that we really tried to, sometimes you can afford yourself a moment that’s more straightforward.
“Aftersun” opens in limited theaters Friday, Oct. 21, before expanding to more cities Oct. 28 and going wide Nov. 4.
