Interview

A Conversation with the Creators of "Sunday"

by Anthony Kaufman

"Sunday", winner of the coveted Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year, premieres in selected theaters today. A powerfully subtle and moving document of lost identities and lost homes, the film carves out a strong presence for itself in the arena of American indies. I met with director Jonathon Nossiter, along with his creative partner, poet/writer James Lasdun, and Alex Campbell, the producer of their upcoming project "Signs & Wonders", a thriller set in Greece.
Nossiter, who cuts a frame similar to Liam Neeson, first stormed into his apartment, late because of a "creative dialogue" with his distributor: "when you talk to a journalist, you try to avoid the subject of your distributor because generally it's nothing but rancor and resentment." Nossiter calms down with a glass of wine from his personal collection of samples. (He makes a living creating wine lists for New York restaurants) The interview begins with the popping of a cork.

Jonathan Nossiter: Nice color. (Referring to the wine) It's great. This is fucking great. . . that's a very sophisticated wine term.

indieWIRE: "This is really great."

Nossiter: Fucking great.

iW: I'm working on it.

Nossiter: If you take my course, you'll learn to get to that extra level of expression.

iW: Half wine testing and half directing -- a joint venture? That might work.

Nossiter: It's based on two notions: drinking and saying fucking great. . . or fucking terrible. And then getting them to say the same thing. Probably not that different from directing, or at least the way I direct.

iW: How do you direct?

(Everyone laughs, avoiding the question.)

iW: Let's go back to "Sunday"? Did you have a complete script before shooting?

Nossiter: Absolutely. James and I worked on the script for a couple of years. It was a very honed and polished piece of work. We had written it with an openness. If you look at the script, James is a very distinguished poet and writer and I think you can see his mark, the level of craft and polish and is very much a part of the way James writes. There were things that were left open to allow it to breath. We got the best of both worlds, because I think the film has the benefit of a very disciplined and very talented craftsmen- writer. That sort of level of polish and understanding of the way words and stories can be shaped and at the same time, it benefited from my incompetence and my desire to keep things open.

James Lasdun: You always wanted both those things. You wanted us to work out a real screenplay, but you also wanted the option of improvisation. And we filmed both. And a lot of the best moments are improvised. Some of the best lines were improvised by the actors.

Nossiter: But they only exist. . .

iW: Because of the framework you set up.

Nossiter: Which is something that a lot of people don't understand. They think that improvisation in itself has merit and it doesn't. I think that we had written something that allowed the actors both to have something concrete to work off of, but they could feel there was this spirit of openness. Even the writing of the script came out of a fairly complex ping-pong match between me and James and our experiences. My experience in Queens over many years and James's experience in the shelter. We were drawing on concrete things that had some resonance. I got James to hang out in Queens and James got me to work in the shelter.

iW: The scenes in the shelter are incredibly authentic -- very, very real. It occurred to me that some of this must have been improved. And I wondered how much was developed?

JL: It's hard to say. They were actors, they weren't homeless people. The only guy, maybe was the Chinese guy, he didn't live in the shelter. . .

Nossiter: But he's virtually homeless. There was something extremely moving about him, very beautiful, tragic, but also, to me, it's indicative of the intention of the spirit of the film, there was something incredibly moving about him, but he was never maudlin or sentimental. He didn't evoke a sentimental response. He didn't ask you to pity him. He evoked real emotion, but he has a dignity and a pride, which is sort of surprising given also the inherent comic element.

There is a misconception among some people in their reaction to the film. I wouldn't say it's common, but I've seen it enough to remark on it. They think it's a film about misery, because it's about middle age people which is not very trendy in America. Because it looks at some of the problems that are involved with being on the edge of middle class and the underclass, not for a second did either one of us, or one of the actors, think that we were engaging in some sort of descent into horror or depression. It's quite the opposite. You know the point is that people haven't given up. There's nothing remotely depressing about human beings who are still struggling. What I find depressing is complacency and lack of imagination, lack of sympathy.

And when I see those elements in a film, no matter how happy the apparent ending is, I find that so dispiriting. And I think most people do. And I think people who make those kinds of films deeply underestimate the sophistication and intelligence of an ordinary moviegoer. I see this film all the way has a very strong energy to it, not at all pessimistic, not at all cynical, not at all downbeat.
(Nossiter turns to his VCR where we look at videotape that was shot a year and a half before shooting "Sunday". The Queens locations and stray homeless people look as if they are scenes from his film or should I say, they are scenes from Queens that he has lifted for his film.)

Nossiter: In low-budget filmmaking, you have the obvious disadvantage of not having money, but the huge advantage you have, the huge benefit you have is time. And in that time, you can compensate. I would make no apologies if the film doesn't work or displeases people. I would never say it's because we didn't have enough money. I think you can make things succeed and fail on their own merits if you take advantage of the fact that you have the time to engage and explore -- this is the advantage we have over the 50 million dollar movie.

The fact that first of all we could build it out of the years of experience that James had, that I could, during the writing of the film, spend a year and a half in this place, that I could take the time to build up relationships, which were safely established by James, build on those relationships, gain their trust, and after 6 months say, look, I'd like to bring a video camera in, I'd like to start a relationship with the lens. I wanted to develop this relationship so when I come in here to shoot, I'm not searching for something. It's invaluable. It's a huge benefit that people don't realize about low-budget filmmaking.

Continuing our interview, it occurs to me that Jonathon Nossiter and James Lasdun are no ordinary couple of smart filmmakers. The preparation, thoughtfulness and collaboration that went into the making of "Sunday" was extremely thorough, all the way through from script to production to finished film. Nossiter, although with little directing experience, has lived all over the world. Lasdun is a published poet and visiting professor at esteemed universities; these are some brilliant guys with a passion to back it up.

In Nossiter's apartment, we turn to the TV screen again, which now shows the inside of the shelter, and Nossiter speaking with a homeless man

Lasdun: We were never trying to make a film about homelessness. The paths between what you do show about homelessness feels totally authentic, without making it seem like this is a film about homelessness. It's not, it's a film in which homelessness plays an integral part. So, we started laying out the whole anthropology of homelessness. . .

iW: But the woman who has a home, Madeleine, you could say, she is homeless?

Lasdun: That's what we wanted to do. Find the resonance of that whole notion.

Nossiter: Being without shelter. It's not just physical, it's also psychological, emotional . .

iW: Right. I think it comes across. Why it works is it's a backdrop for the characters and the story. . . there is a sense of place, and the relationships between people and place. What did Queens provide for you?

[Again, we turn to the videotape and examine Queens from a passing car.]

Nossiter: I took James around and he looked at it and said, "It looks as if they started to build Manhattan and after one building gave up. I guess that's Queens." Which is exactly right. . . The thing about Queens that's interesting to me is that it has three critical elements, three strange contradictory elements: one is it has elements of small town America, it feels in places, archetypical American, there are little Hopper moments, even, in "Sunday". Not many places in the New York area that have that feeling where it's not ersatz -- where you don't feel it's been reconstructed for consumption. Because Queens is the forgotten borough, and therefore it's inherently interesting to me, things that are forgotten. . .

What also interests me is it does have a relationship to New York, but it's just out of reach. It is now the home of all the new immigrant groups. . . So despite its doodled into existence surface, it's transient, sort of ephemeral makeshift, which is another James phrase, that was particularly felicitous and apt. The third element about Queens is the fact that under this dull makeshift surface, it has a vibrancy and a vitality, it's also some weird comment on the American dream. . . It's a strange transit camp for people in search of the American dream.

Lasdun: But it has that paradoxical thing. It is a transit camp, but people get stuck there.

iW: James, once the filming was started, did you play any other roles?

Lasdun: I was there on set most days, which for me, was a fascinating thing, in its own right. My official job was to see that David Sachet kept his weight on.

Nossiter: It was well known by the second week the only reason why James showed up every day is he's English, you have to remember that -- a free lunch that was actually good is irresistible.

iW: You had good free lunches? What kind of independent film were you?

Nossiter: They weren't free to us. They were free to him. You should look at this as indicative of the spirit of the film. The sort of artificial lines and distinctions that people draw, this hierarchy of moviemaking, should be crap. I mean, why should James's contribution as a writer stop when I'm on the set. Does a script stop having meaning? The point is that it was alive and breathing. And James would see things. I would see things. We would talk. We talk at the end of the day. We'd look at dailies. If James talked to the actors, rather than freak out, I was delighted - it meant one less conversation. (Laughs) If you want to make films, there should be a delight in communal activity.

Lasdun: That said, though, you become aware as you come on a set that you're entering an atmosphere of heightened and extremely intensified cross relations.

(Nossiter bellows deep laughter.)

Lasdun: Anything you do or say is amplified massively, so you'd be a fool to do or say anything that wasn't very carefully considered. You know, I didn't say. That was the right thing.

Nossiter: Well, that's actually not. . . You're a naturally discreet presence, but the point is you and I talked a lot.

Lasdun: Yeah, but we talked in private.

Nossiter: But our conversations had meaning, because you were observing, you were not cut off.

iW: How was it working with David Suchet?

Nossiter: He's a master film actor. And he understood. If David was sitting where James is, and I had the camera over here, David would just look at me and say, "Jonathon, what lens?" And I'd tell him and he immediately knew what the frame size was, he knew how to judge. He would then, it's not just knowing it, it's then doing something with it. He then understood how to calibrate the inflection of his elbow in relation to the eyebrow, he knew where the eyeball should move, how much the pupil should dilate. That's characteristic of very, very good English actors. They have total control of their instrument. What makes David different, I think, is that there's a sort of wild American streak in him. He's got heart. There's a kind of fire in him and a willingness to take emotional chances, to lay himself open and vulnerable. . .

iW: What tradition of filmmaking do you think the film falls into?

Nossiter: A tradition of filmmaking where the people who make the film are interested in two basic things, human beings to begin with. . . and why we do the peculiar things we do to each other. Then the second thing is being concerned about how you convey those problems, being not concerned, being interested, being excited, taking actual pleasure and exploring how to convey that. . . .

iW: Do you think that "humanist tradition" is related to a transparent camera as opposed to one that is invasive?

Nossiter: I do, I do. I talked about [Arthur] Penn and Penn talks about Kurosawa and Kurosawa talks about Marcel Carne, and, you know, shit, I mean talking about some rocking filmmakers. People who are stylistically, spectacularly innovative. I stand by the belief that "Night Moves" is one of the great America films, but what these people have done, unlike our shrill contemporaries who maybe have spent too much time in film school and not enough time living and reading and looking at paintings. To innovate for its own sake is almost immoral. I couldn't give a shit if I'm looking at a new technique, if it's a technique for technique's sake, you know. . . You know what tradition of filmmaking I think it comes out of? Actually Homer. Homer is the first great filmmaker.