On the other end of the phone line, first time feature director though veteran film and television producer Dia Sokol admits that she’s more than a bit nervous for this interview about her naturalistic “anti-chemistry, unromantic comedy” debut Sorry, Thanks. “This never used to happen to me. As a producer, I’d listen to directors fumble their way through describing their films, and I’ve always jumped in and been the person to sell it, to be articulate about it, and now I totally get it,” she says. “When it’s your film, you’re totally inarticulate about it; it comes from inside of you, so you have no perspective.”
Starring a mixed cast of professional and non-professional actors and shot by a skeleton crew in San Francisco’s endearingly eccentric Mission District, Sorry, Thanks follows two adrift lonesomes Max (Wiley Wiggins) and Kira (Kenya Miles), neither of whom, even after a shared one-night stand, can begin to reconcile their thoughts on romantic relationships. As Max chases Kira, detaching himself along the way from longtime girlfriend Sara (Ia Hernandez), and attempts to immune himself to the criticism of his best bud Mason (Andrew Bujalski), Kira explores an uninspiring dating scene that only very quietly pinpoints the sadness of her recent break-up.
Despite its bittersweet, introspection-inducing lining, Sorry, Thanks is at its core incredibly funny, even at times painfully funny. Foibles are so at the surface, sarcasm so easily blended with childlike wonder that it’s simple to just enjoy the film without questioning every character intention and situation repercussion. It’s easy, namely, to root for Max and Kira even as they stumble into moral quagmires, and that’s where Sokol, in only the most articulate of manners, begins discussing her work.
[In the film’s production notes] you pose the question, “Can we still love these characters even when they are doing things wrong?” For me that answer with this film was, “Yes.” Yet I don’t fully know why it is that I still have that faith even as I watch these characters fall into situations that are morally gray. So, this idea of the moral quandary, I was hoping that we could start our talk there.
I started my career working for Errol Morris, and that informed a lot of my skepticism about the idea of redemption. So, when I talked to [co-writer and producer Lauren Veloski] about starting to write this, I said, “I really want to make a film that’s about redemption.” (laughs) When I look at this film now and think about that, to me it’s a reminder, “Oh yeah, and I don’t believe in redemption.” I believe in it as a concept, but I don’t know that I believe in it as an actuality. I don’t think the world works that way, and I’m incredibly ambivalent about films that act like you can make up for your bad actions. So, in some ways, I wanted the film to be about, “When you break something, is it really broken?”
In this case, our faith in the characters, our trust in the characters, those characters are always breaking it. Are we going to be able to forgive them and move on? Every character, even the smaller characters, get co-opted into that question. When we’ve done small test screenings of the film, we’ve definitely gotten feedback about all of the characters, and everyone is split down the middle. They either loved Max and loved Kira, or hated one of the two, and that’s even when they’d really enjoyed the story. Every character was on every list, the hate and love lists. That’s when we knew that we could stop editing and when our job was done.
When you’re making a really small film, the moral quandary is what you have to work with as the most authentic narrative tool…I like the idea of making a film about people who are doing bad things who might never really be accountable for their actions but who you like regardless, who you’re drawn to and identify with. That’s really what life is. In Hollywood movies people do bad things, and there are tons of consequences. In real life and in the film, there are consequences, but they’re not as direct. It’s fun to be able to play with that subtlety.
Also, I like the idea of being able to implicate the audience. Because the film’s a comedy, and because we’re watching it happen, we’re laughing all the way along, all the way to the end. We get implicated in their bad behavior. That felt very much like the key to the film.
It’s definitely a conversation that I’ve had with [filmmaker Andrew Bujalski, whose much-lauded features Sokol has produced] multiple times through the many projects that I’ve worked with him on. We talked about it a lot with Mutual Appreciation. Do the characters lack a moral center? There’s a very short scene in this film, in the bar scene right after Kira has talked with her best friend Rachel, and then when Sara and Max show up, Kira and Sara are having a conversation about a movie, and they’re saying, “Oh, I don’t know. I think the character lacks a moral center.” That’s a tiny, little moment where I always felt like, “Well, isn’t that…?” We slipped it in because it’s like, “Do these characters lack a moral center?” Basically. Then I think, “Does everybody lack a moral center?” It’s a pretty cynical idea.
I’m actually not a relationship cynic at all. I’m a total romantic. I may have written a film in a more cynical mindset, being doubtful about finding any real connection with people, but…
I wonder if the fact that you are a romantic is the reason that you felt confident enough to be able to make a film that’s semi-cynical about relationships. This, for me, is just not a film that could have come from a true relationship cynic. Not only is it too comic and light-hearted, it’s also too level-headed.
Interesting. I think there’s real value to people thinking that they have connections to other people, even if, from the outside, it doesn’t look like that. Because this is a film that’s basically like a conversation with your friends, or at least parts of it are, you can imagine any of these characters calling you up to obsess about the situation that they are in. And, you can think you know all the answers to these relationship problems, but it doesn’t change the fact that Kira and Max are projections of each other’s needs; that has it’s own value, even if that doesn’t mean that it’s the greatest love story ever written.
What’s fascinating is that when we’ve shown this film to the small test audiences, half of the people say, “I think that Kira and Max end up together, and this is just a tough time.” That’s the part that comes from Errol Morris, that idea that if you give people a protagonist, it doesn’t matter how abhorrent they are, we want to believe the best. We will reach out with our best hopes and project our best expectations onto them. That turns out to be true with a love story, that a lot of people think, “This is just the beginning of a love story. It’s just the part that you don’t get to see explored very often.” I love that.
(For a time, Sokol and I speak a bit about the importance of withholding an authorial editorial comment, that because no judgment is made of the characters in the film, they are, even for their flaws, able to charm the audience. The process of writing such complex characters, who at the same time suffer lack of self-awareness, however, is far from simple.)
…Frankly, it’s been a very, very frustrating endeavor to try to make a film about a woman who’s really shut down. It’s hard to write it; it’s really hard to direct it. I feel like I didn’t have a lot of models to look at. I didn’t want to overdo it; I wanted [the Kira] performance to be consistent, as opposed to all of the other performances I was seeing in which the women were really restrained until they exploded. That’s a very different kind of acting, a very different kind of performance.
Why do you say that? Even if you don’t have examples of that emotional restraint in other pieces of art, that’s such an everyday life conundrum for women that I would think it easy to pick up on. I feel like people in general, but especially women, aren’t particularly honest with their emotions.
Really? That’s so interesting. Maybe it’s just my perception that woman are so emotionally astute that I found when I was writing that it was easier sometimes to write scenes between the guys. They can be so overtly distant from what their emotions are, what’s really happening and what they’re trying to do for each other that they’re already buried beneath two levels of emotion; their motivations and intentions are already buried down two levels.
Maybe this is just with the [women] characters I created because I felt like I knew them and understood them, I felt like it was hard to have them talk about emotion and not have them sound incredibly boring and on the nose in the same way as a Lifetime movie. It was a challenge, but maybe it was just a challenge for me. Maybe it’s not true; maybe women don’t know their emotions…But, it was very hard to make that authentic.
We’ve talked about all of these big, heavy themes, but as with what you’ve said in the production notes, and what I felt watching the film, these ideas of morality don’t really show up until the last scene of the film. The rest of the film is just so incredibly comic that I run the risk here, by asking you all of these questions, of making the film seem didactic, when it’s not at all that.
It shouldn’t be! It’s a comedy. It’s light…People should sit back, enjoy it and laugh as these characters fumble and not pursue at top speed their own journeys of self-discovery.
On that note, each filmmaker, with his work, walks his own path of self-discovery…What self-discovery process did this film force you to go through?
Filmmaking is hard—everybody knows that—but I don’t think I realized quite how much directing is about forgiveness. Every morning when we were making the film, I’d wake up, and I’d think, “Directing is about forgiveness.” I remember that after the very first day of shooting I learned so much. That first day I had to rethink the whole film because I realized that there were a lot of things that weren’t going to be good for me, or for the project at least. I remember coming home, and my boyfriend [Garret Savage], who was also our on-set editor and media manager, was also cutting a documentary full-time during the day, and I’d come home with the footage, and he’d take a look at it, download all of it, get it organized and cut scenes together so that I could take a look. And, that day, he pointed out some problems with the very first scenes we shot and asked me, “Well, how are you going to do this and that?” I was like, “Oh, this is great! Feedback! Thank you so much. I’m so glad that I learned that, that I made those mistakes. Glad I got that out of the way.” (laughs) I was so naïve. I swear to God I thought, “Oh, I’m so glad I made the mistakes on my first day. Now I can go make the rest of the movie,” not realizing that—it’s ridiculous—every day you’re making a million decisions and a million intuitive calls. I’ve done that with producing, but it’s so different with directing. It’s like, “Oh, I get it. Every day there’s going to be a list of ten things that will keep me up at night.”
I was in Berlin with Andrew for the premiere of Beeswax, and we were talking about these differences. He was asking me about what it’s like now for me as a director, and I was telling him, “I didn’t realize I could be so insecure. I always felt so confident doing what I’d been doing.” I don’t mean to sound overly confident, but I always felt competent. I always felt relatively secure in what my job is. I know what it is, and I know what I do. I was like, “It was harrowing. It was excruciating. It was fascinating and energizing and the most awful thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t wait to do it again.” (laughs) We were just laughing because that’s basically exactly what it’s like. It’s a level of engagement that I’d never thought I’d have professionally.
I’m always interested to hear how writing teams work. How did you and Lauren collaborate?
I’d written Kira’s part of the story as a full script almost a year before bringing Lauren on board. I knew the themes of the script, but it still wasn’t totally there for me. I kept on taking a stab at this Max character, I felt like he was the key to the story, but I wasn’t loving what I was coming up with. I knew Lauren very peripherally, although I liked her a lot. We’d worked together a bit, so I called her, and knowing that she was a screenwriter and incredibly smart, I said, “Do you want to take a stab?” I didn’t ask her to re-write the existing script, but I had this idea that we’d take on these two characters with separate but overlapping fears. So I talked to her, gave her an outline of what I knew about Max, and she went off to create him, his world and his friends. Then we started working together to see how the pieces fit together. By the end we both felt real ownership of the whole script. It started as these very separate pieces, and by reading scenes through and making line-by-line changes, it ended as very integrated. Sometimes one of us would go off and write a new scene, and then bring it back for the other to give feedback. It was a very non-traditional process. It wasn’t like, “She starts the sentence, and I finish it.” It was with true respect, I think, for our different styles. We both knew certain characters better than others, and we tried to use that to the advantage of the film, to really have it feel like these were different characters penned by different people, that they had truly different voices.
I also appreciate the fact that the film isn’t exposition heavy.
We have some of that, and sometimes you need it and try to do it in the most minimal, sincere way. That was definitely a challenge, and we could tell. We were just hysterical when we were writing. We would just read it through together and laugh and laugh any time we were too on the nose. We were like, “Oh, my God! That won’t work at all!”
We also both think Back to the Future is, like, the best movie ever made, and so we used it as our guide for everything. Lauren can go through scene-by-scene in the movie and tell you how it corresponds to a scene in Back to the Future. We were like, “Wait, this is exactly like the scene where he’s in the tree. What is our device?” Then we got worried, because we were overly obsessed, that it would be too obvious that this movie is Back to the Future.
So a wrap-up question: What is one question that you’ve wanted to be asked about Sorry, Thanks, either from people who’ve worked on the film or the others who’ve seen it, that you’ve wanted to be asked but have yet to be asked?
Clearly I want them to ask me about the cats! Who could not be impressed with a cat? So, maybe my question is, “How is it to direct cats?”
So, how is it directing cats?
It’s incredibly challenging. They had some really intense ideas about their roles, and they wanted to take them in their own direction…Napkin, the stray cat—well, both cats had a lot of ideas frankly—but Napkin’s ideas mostly were about the blocking on the mantle, and I felt they were pretty out there. Napkin really wanted to break the fourth wall in order to see the other crew members as they were holding the equipment and bounce boards. We talked a lot about it, and at the end of the day I feel like I got my way and fooled Napkin into doing what I wanted. I’d work with her again.
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