Lynn Shelton’s second feature, My Effortless Brilliance stars Sean Nelson of the band Harvey Danger (whose biggest hit, “Flagpole Sitta”, was memorialized in a ridiculously popular web clip last year) as Eric Lambert Jones, a novelist whose self-obsession costs him his relationship with his oldest friend. Struggling to recapture the success of his first book with his third, Eric takes a detour from a book tour to drop in on said friend’s cabin in the woods in an attempt to try to repair the friendship. Brilliance will be screening in the Narrative Competition at SXSW. Shelton’s last feature, We Go Way Back, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Slamdance Film Festival. By now, you know how this goes: trailer above, Shelton’s answers to the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody below.
Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.
My Effortless Brilliance is like My Dinner With Andre meets Deliverance. With a cougar thrown in for good measure.
It’s about narcissism, the crippling effects of success, the terror of failure, and, most all, the limitations of friendship.
I got the idea for making a film like My Effortless Brilliance while I was in production on my first narrative feature, We Go Way Back. That experience was truly eye-opening for me because it was my first time working on a traditional movie set. Although I’d been making films for over a decade, my educational background had been in photography and theater and I’d always approached filmmaking like a painter in a studio might–it was a totally solo experience. I had worked on other people’s narrative work, but always as an editor so I was totally unfamiliar with the culture and life of a film set.
And I loved it, I loved being on a real movie set, the busyness of it, the way that everyone worked together to form this gigantic functioning creative organism. Having creative collaborators was terrifying and liberating and astounding and it totally changed the way that I approached making art–it all became about relationships for me. Relationship-based filmmaking you could call it.
As life-changing and wonderful as the experience was however, I was frustrated by the way that traditional movie-making seemed almost custom-designed to obstruct the central work of the project–that of the actor. I immediately started fantasizing about trying to find a way of making films that would be as easy on the actors as possible–a completely performance-centered process: small unobtrusive crew, minimal eqiupment, 360?? lighting, long takes. Plus, characters based on the actors themselves and words that would come straight out of the actors’ own brains: improvised lines.
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