It's a brutal time for major theatrical releases right now-- of the films in the box office top 10, none released in 2011 have a fresh Rotten Tomatoes score-- so as always, you've got to look to the indie world for rays of hope. As it turns out the only major release this weekend getting anything close to positive reviews is Cold Weather, a breakout hit from last year's SXSW Film Festival that opens in New York, as well as video on-demand nationwide, this Friday. It expands to Los Angeles next weekend.
Directed by Aaron Katz, Cold Weather starts as the story of a relationship between an adult brother and sister (Chris Lankenau and Trieste Kelly Dunn) and morphs into a detective story when the brother's ex-girlfriend mysteriously goes missing. It's easy to toss the generic label "mumblecore" at the film, but Katz's direction is way more careful and elegant than that, and the story is a lot more unexpected than just another story about loquacious twenty-somethings talking over their feelings.
Below I've got an interview I did with Katz over the phone earlier this week-- fittingly enough, we didn't meet in person thanks to the godawful cold weather besieging New York right now-- and we're also exclusively debuting the film's soundtrack, which you can hear streaming below and also click to download. The score, composed by Keegan DeWitt, gives you a nice sense of the movie's playful but tense tone. Read what DeWitt had to say about his work with Katz below, then listen to a streaming sample from the score.
Development for the "Cold Weather" score started almost a year before we even began shooting. Aaron and I would trade ideas and demos back and forth from Nashville to Pittsburgh and many of these experiments and ideas can be heard on the supplementary second disc of the downloadable score. From the very beginning, we put a focus on trying to find a way to create melody using sounds that were not instantly placable by the ear. We started by attempting to use samples from the natural world as our primary source (you can hear this notably in the "End Titles" cue). We then took some of those pieces and began to introduce clanging and banging of found objects. We were very concerned with how we would create tension and suspension an as inventive a way possible. Using only plucked strings in conjunction with some of our earlier ideas allowed us to do this. You'll rarely find any sustained notes throughout the entire score for this reason. In the end, the mixture of all these elements, and some lengthily development, lead us to a unique and notable sounding score does a lot of work with a lot of different tools all at once.
Click to download the Cold Weather score for free
OK, now on to my interview with Katz, who shot Cold Weather in his native Portland and now lives in Pittsburgh with his girlfriend. I talked to him about operating outside the usual movie production hubs of New York and Los Angeles, deciding to thread a genre detective story into his brother and sister relationship film, and what it's like not self-distributing his film for the first time. For more on Cold Weather and where you can see it, visit the film's Facebook page.
How did you pick the title to evoke the mood of the film, rather than something more specific about what the movie's about?
One inspiration for the title was pulpy novels from the 30s and 40s, that have these specific titles that sound kind of terse and don't take on meaning until you read the book. Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest is kind of a good example-- it's sort of suggestive of something, but you're not sure what until you read the book. The titles is kind of a Rorschach-- you put on it what you take from the movie.
Did you ever consider going even pulpier? The Coldest Weather?
We didn't consider going more pulpy with it. We were using it as a working title and it grew to fit that movie that we made. Also it kind of of reminds me of a P.G. Wodehouse title, who also had these two-word titles that you're not quite sure what to make of until you read the book.
Did you think about the genre element as a way to set Cold Weather apart from other talky low-budget dramas about young people, and maybe another way to convince people to see it? Did that factor into your thinking at all?
Not in the first draft. When I was writing it, I started writing a script about a brother and sister, and on a whim just started incorporating the mystery element into it, because I was reading a mystery book and it seemed like a good idea. That made me get excited about continuing to write. I didn't think really at all about the effect it would have. It seemed at the time a little crazy to me. I think that once we started trying to find money for it, we were thinking about how this maybe would set it apart. I feel like there's an expectation that a film that focuses on characters that are complex, three-dimensional, real people, it's going to focus only n that and there's not going to be a genre story in there. And if the film's a genre film then the characters are only going to be as complex as necessary fro the plot. I don't think that's true. I think that my favorite films are films where the characters are more complex than you'd expect, but the story is something you wouldn't expect. A film like McCabe and Mrs. Miller really works as a Western, but at the same time it's about the relationship between Warren Beatty and Julie Christie.
Early in the film you establish a slow pace that really benefits the humor of the mystery later on. These characters sit on a park bench and eat lunch for a long time, then get into the investigation. How did you calibrate that pace to lead up to the detective work?
I think the two most challenging things, in the writing process and the editing process, were finding the balance between the comedy and the more serious parts of the mystery. We really wanted to take our time in the beginning of the movie, and try and have it feel like it would feel if it some unforeseen circumstances came up in real life. There were talks about, well, should we move the mystery up? To us it made sense to get to know these people and have the mystery not be a surprise, but not be a totally different world. Not foreshadow it, but not be something that couldn't possibly happen to these people.
And you don't lean too hard on the comedy either.
I think Cris Lankenau is really funny in general. I didn't know exactly what was going to play funny, but I knew that putting Chris in certain scenes of this movie would yield things that were funny. Even in the editing process there were things that we weren't sure how they would play. It wasn't until SXSW that we really got a sense of what things were going to play funny. Now there's things that get a laugh every time that we weren't necessarily expecting. I think humor is important, and even very serious movies I like there to be humor. In life there is humor that comes just out of how people react to certain situations. There's maybe a couple of jokes, but it's more jokes that come out of the characters.
Are you planning to work with larger budgets on your upcoming films, or are you just taking things as they come?
I think it is a matter of what comes up next. The script I mentioned [a period piece about a thief] would definitely require a bigger budget, but there's another script I'm working on that could be done on the same budget as Cold Weather. To me making an indie movie is exciting, you just have a broader selection of movies you could make with more money.
Are you sticking outside of the New York and L.A. film production worlds for now?
We'll see. I think if I could make a studio movie but have a relatively high degree of control in what the movie was, I'd love to do that. My hope is that making movies completely outside the system in a way we don't answer to anyone besides ourselves, that buys us a degree of trust.
This is the first one of your films to have this extensive theatrical release, right?
This is the first film that's had a theatrical distributor besides us. The other two we self-distributed, and we really didn't know what we were doing on Dance Party and learned a lot, and applied that when we released Quiet City. Having a distributor is great, because you can get it out to a lot of people, and there's an infrastructure at IFC, and they know what they're doing.
One of the reasons IFC can get it out to so many people is because of the VOD program, which I don't even think existed when you first started making films. Has VOD changed the options for you when it comes to getting your films out there?
It allows people who don't live in NY or LA or another big city to see the film, you can live anywhere and be able to see the film. And, it's a new way for companies to make money. It allows them to expand their scope of movies that they're buying. I think a lot of really interesting movies get bought, and they can support theatrical movies that are really interesting or risky. If they didn't have VOD they wouldn't take as many chances.
