So we can say that it was certainly scripted.
It’s very scripted. My girlfriend would actually get upset because this script is like 40 pages, and some of it has dialogue, and some of it has descriptions of dialogue, what they talk about, and where that scene will begin and end. And I’ll be like, “Yeah, it’s this sort of script,” and she’ll say, “That’s a script! It’s a script.” It’s really structured. We had our story, had our characters, had our journey, and had our scenes. But we were able to adjust how we captured those based on what the movie was telling us.
With all of your films, I know that you love to shoot characters with long lenses at a huge distance. Is that different when there’s a big movie star in the mix? Or are you going guerilla?
New York is amazing to shoot in for a few reasons, and the way that I like to shoot is not closing down streets and putting up lights. You can get a permit to do that very easily, and New Yorkers don’t seem to really care. We had paparazzi for one or two days, but it wasn’t an issue.
Vanessa is very … I’m going to tell you this story, and I’m going to ask her later if I can include it. I brought a bunch of the kids to meet her when we were in New York, before the shooting. A bunch of the teens, me and her, and we were outside, and her SUV was there. We were going to go to a pizza place a block away, and she was saying goodbye to somebody. I knew the security guard, and I said, “I think we’re going to walk two blocks.” And he said, “Adam. Talent doesn’t walk.” And then “Vanessa’s like, alright, where are we going?” “We’re going to this pizza place two blocks away.” And she said, “Alright, let’s walk!” And then she wanted to walk with those kids. I was like, “Our company is going to be called ‘Talent Doesn’t Walk.’” And so she walks, she wants to walk. She would really hate the idea that I was changing my process for her, for being recognized.
Did that ever happen in the making of it? That you needed to adjust?
Everybody needs something different. She’s the easiest on-set actor I’ve worked with in terms of you can basically do any approach. She wants to be sent into the wild, or you can give her lines, which I am so not used to doing. She’d be like, “Just feed me lines sometimes” if she was interacting with somebody. And at the same time, she goes into a method zone; she goes into her own thing for 20 minutes and does scene-work on the fly. Sometimes she’ll be getting pages two hours before; sometimes, she’ll be rehearsing scenes that we’ll be shooting three weeks in advance. She was amenable to everything, but part of my job is finding the process with each actor. But that process was not informed by her being, you know, Princess Margaret. We did have someone on the street say, “You look like Princess Margaret from ‘The Crown.’” She’s in character, so she’s like, “I … don’t … know.”
Isn’t there an autobiographical idea? You clearly are interested in youth.
I know this question is coming. Yeah, you have a storyteller who tells stories about New York City teens, researching to tell a story about teens.
Is that intentional?
There’s a little bit of “What would Freud say?” And for me, I don’t think it is super intentional, and I can be defensive about why it isn’t in a zillion ways. I can tell you that the projects that I was working on the day Vanessa called me, one takes place in Idaho with 40-year-olds, and that doesn’t feel connected to this in any way. But at the same time, I made this, and I definitely identify with the kids in this movie, and they remind me a lot of the kids, including myself growing up in the city. There are definitely people who see the movie; they’re like, “It’s about an artist … taking advantage of kids for their art. [laughs] Way to be so honest about that!” “Oh, yes … I was.”
And then I do think there was something that ended up developing in the movie where I would sort of push to identify that there is a conversation between artist/teenager who is wild and feral and a sort of artist who is in her 30s and is more in the realm of society when we find her in London. Schmoozing, playing the game. How much of that is the conversation between the artist that I think of myself and the artist that people think of me of? I do think that’s in there, but it was not conscious, and I don’t like to do navel-gazing in my movies. I sort of hate movies that are doing that. I don’t think I’m particularly interesting or any more or less interesting than anyone else, and I want to explore other people and other worlds. And we do that in this movie.
One of your long-time collaborators, composer Nicholas Britell, brings a great texture to it.
Nick is obviously an insane talent, and he can do everything. I felt like this was going to need a lot more score because we are in her head. I had a playlist of stuff that I sent to him, but really I went over, and I showed him some raw footage of it, and he was really taken with it. I think he really loves this movie.
He has a lot of things on that drive that he can say, “Well, this is something I was experimenting with a few months ago; what about this?” He was really interested in the idea of something that felt both sort of fantastical but organic, so he was drawn to analog synthesizers, and he was really interested in the idea of using analog synthesizers in a way that wasn’t kitschy. I just really vibe onto that. There’s this great article in the New York Times Magazine about his process with Barry Jenkins, and it really captures what it’s like to work with him. I wake up in the morning, and I get to watch Nick Britell make music from it. And he’s such a different kind of experience in moviemaking, and I feel like I get this very lucky thing. And I can be like, “No, no, I don’t like that.” [laughs]
Especially when looking at your film career, with three movies so far, I’m wondering what kind of growth “Italian Studies” has brought for you?
I don’t necessarily look at things as, “This is a step up or this a step here.” Each movie is its own movie. But I will say for me personally that I think I was a better filmmaker on this one than I was on the last. I think the spirit of this movie, which is about being present, about embracing your environment, was something that I was able to embrace in the making of this movie, and my team was. I think that the previous movies had a lot more rules to them than how I was making them. And this, because it made sense to the story, it didn’t. That was actually very helpful for me. And I don’t know. I’m going to think about that question a lot. But for me, I understand how you can see it as this story, “Here’s this movie, then this movie, then this movie.” But for me, this movie is the movie with Simon in it. It’s a big first step for Simon, and I’m not trying to punt on my creative importance in the movie. But I don’t know what it means in terms of trajectory. I do know that the experience changed me as a person a lot.
And it also relates to things I was going through in my life around the time we were making it, including … I present very much as a neurotic Jew. But it surprises people that I’ve never really been to therapy or since I was a kid. I started to go to therapy right as we were making this movie, which really informs this movie a lot. I was worried in some ways about that, but it helps. I carried “Tramps” pretty heavy. [It was] my second movie, there’s a little chip on my shoulder because it’s so similar in a lot of ways to the first movie, and it worked. At the end. Not because I had the chip on my shoulder, it worked because the things that worked when it worked, when it all came together, I could look back on it and go, “This was when I was letting this movie happen.” I think that was a vital lesson from “Tramps,” and I think that I was so much less worried about “Italian Studies” about if someone was five minutes late. It was more like, “Are they emboldened to do the best work they can do? Are we creating that environment for them?” I really think this movie is better because of it.
Follow along with all our 2021 Tribeca Film Festival coverage here.
