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A self-admitted lover of armchair philosophy, nonfiction filmmaker Andrew Neel prefers questions to answers. “Present day cinema, indie documentaries included, has devolved into thesis-driven filmmaking; people want a conclusion walking out the door. I think that’s the death of cinema.

“When I leave a film that I feel is really good, I leave with lots of complicated questions that I can’t always answer, that I don’t feel comfortable answering,” he explains.

In studying the little understood culture of political conspiracy theorists, Neel, along with longtime collaborator and co-director Luke Meyer, engages with New World Order several of these uncomfortable questions, the most unnerving of which are: Is there a global elite, this New World Order, that orchestrates the hierarchies and power plays in societies? Does this elite, more alarmingly, hope to handicap the world only to rebuild it in its own image later?

As it follows the leaders of the growing 9/11 Truth Movement, foremost among them incendiary activist Alex Jones, the documentary staunchly refuses to make any judgment calls. If at times the messages sent within the film edify too passionately, the calls “9/11 was an inside job,” and “Wake up!” forever after to play in the recordings of the subconscious, it’s that the subjects of the film, not Neel or Meyer themselves as directors, have spoken those messages out so forcefully. Opting instead simply to gaze with great compassion at its oft ignored and scorned subjects, New World Order, at its core, is much less about government machinations than it is about the profundity of humaneness in a world rife with confusion.

Whereas in their last directorial collaboration Darkon, a glimpse into the fantasy world of live action role players, Neel and Meyer had the freedom to engage with all questions of fact and fiction, with New World Order, Neel says, explorations were thorny in that through the process of making the film questions arose that, as the directors, neither he nor Meyer could address for fear of compromising their objectivity, and hence the film along with it. In this interview, however, Neel opens up to share his thoughts on the power of ideas, the problem of peaceful revolution and the little bit of fear he has for the future.

Each of your films has a unique internal logic. Obviously then finding the logic is different for each project. How is the internal logic for this film different from those of your other films? It seemed as if, to me, an even more intense compassion than was present in Darkon informs the logic here.

Definitely, the subject matter that our characters in the film are discussing is much more serious than it is in Darkon. The allegations that they are making, the theories that they have are pretty dire as far as they are concerned, and so our sensitivity to that had to be heightened, and we had to go to even greater lengths not to indulge in the specifics of their theories. That is, in Darkon, for instance, part of the point of the movie, the internal logic if we’re going to talk about it in those terms, was about indulging in the fantasies of the people who played Darkon. In New World Order we actually had to not get involved in the conspiracy theories. I want to make a very strong delineation there. These are not fantasies in New World Order. They are concepts; they’re ideologies; they’re ideas. In order to serve those properly, in our opinion as directors, we couldn’t allow ourselves the luxury of getting wrapped up in one theory or the other.

What we tried to do from the very beginning was not to over-educate ourselves about the conspiracy theories. We wanted to just let the characters talk, let them say what they had to say. There are plenty of people in the world who call them kooks; there are plenty of people in the world who call them messiahs. We didn’t want to get involved in that discussion. We just wanted to show them frankly as they are. What that demanded was that where in Darkon we created a cinematic reality that mimicked the internal world alive in the characters’ heads, in this film we tried to understand the genesis of how [the subjects] came to believe what they believe. So there’s a difference there. We were an active partner in the internal world in the players of Darkon, and I think, for the most part, we were not that in this film. We kept that at arm’s length and really stepped back and had a more objective, in a way traditional cinematic distance from the subjects.

Let me just say I’m very reticent—not that I don’t think it makes for an interesting discussion—to compare Darkon to New World Order. It’s more useful to contrast them than it is to compare them in that I don’t want to imply somehow that we made one movie about a bunch of people who believe in a fantasy world, and in this movie, it’s another group who believes in a different fantasy world. I don’t think that’s the case. A lot of what the people are saying in New World Order has many elements of truth to it. So while there’s a similar feeling between the two movies in terms of our relationships to our subjects and our compassion for them, I think it’s an inverted model.

And I certainly don’t mean to imply that connection…My feeling, when watching the film, was that both you and Luke were simply searching for moments of a pure humanity. Among my favorite of those moments is the one in which Alex, while driving down the highway, says that he’s so sick of these hit pieces from the media, that he always deceives himself into believing that he has relationships with these reporters that he later finds out are false. That’s such a shining example, for me, in the film of the raw human component.

It’s easy for the mainstream media to dismiss Alex because he’s bombastic, and from time to time, a little out of hand. He’s an activist; he’s impassioned, and impassioned people are sometimes easy to dismiss. Actually, Alex is a very generous, warm, charismatic person, and he believes totally in what he is doing. I think we tried to make that apparent to the audience. I do hope that people come out of the film feeling like they know and understand human beings that believe in these ideas rather than continuing to see them as two-dimensional stereotypes. “Conspiracy theorists,” that term itself, is a problem; it’s almost a derogatory term. They are so quickly dismissed by mainstream media that I think a lot of the good things that they have to say and have to offer toward a dialogue are lost in the mix. So we were trying to demonstrate to the audience that these are human beings with understandable, either mediated or real, experiences that led them to see the world in the way they see it.

The fact of the matter is that we all have religions, ideologies, political beliefs, social beliefs that are formed by our experiences. Those beliefs then go on to define our faith, I think, in a very grand way. For people who believe very strongly that’s even more true. For this set of people, these beliefs that they’ve adopted and that they’ve come to through their own experiences or research have come to define their lives in a really intense way. And I think that we’re seeing that all over the world right now in many different forms.

Can you give me another example of that, in perhaps another area?

Democrat, Republican, Christian, Muslim, Evangelical, Liberal, Libertarian. In the end, this is a film, in my opinion—Luke and I have been talking about this a lot lately—a film about ideas. It’s a film about the power of ideas to control our lives.

We all have a construct in our minds about the way the world works—about what’s good, about what’s bad, about what people are trying to get out of us, about what we are trying to get out of other people. We walk around in the world, all of us, with that construct, and it defines how we live. So [Jack McLamb and Seth Jackson among the other subjects of the film] are extreme examples of that because they are really passionate about what they believe in. It’s an interesting microcosm in which to look at that human phenomenon.

The part of the world that’s closest to me that’s like this is liberals. I’m surrounded by liberals; I’m surrounded by knee-jerk liberals, and every day I see them making misinformed conclusions about the world because of an ideology, because of the construct that they’ve created in their heads. This is baseline human behavior. It’s at the core of our experience.

We are exposed to information now in the Information Age, by an increasingly stratified and massive amount of data that we then sift through and use to create our ideas about the world. These then motivate us moving forward. All of world history has been built out of these ideas, ideas that are in our heads that we then bring out into the world, and it’s either a mess or it’s not. Everyone is engaging in this all the time, and all ideologies, at least to some extent, are flawed in that they have a construct around them, and hopefully the construct is flexible.

I also really love the point Timucin Leflef brings up. His response to this notion of ideas as control is that we, and he particularly though I assumed that statement into a “we,” exist in a state between fear and anger and that we all have a feeling in our guts that we have to save ourselves or everybody else from that same fear and anger. I wonder if that’s always necessarily true, that every idea we are presented with, whether that idea be good or bad, requires that we maintain that skepticism, that we are still going to have at least a little bit of that fear and anger when we’re introduced to that new idea.

Fear and anger are alive in every day life, just all the time, especially when it comes to trying to process new ideas and new information. One of the interesting things, I think, that Alex says in the movie is that people always dismiss conspiracy theorists by saying that they just want to make the world simpler; they want to make it all make sense because it makes them feel better and safer. Alex makes the really interesting point there that, in fact, it doesn’t: “It makes me feel terrified, it makes me feel angry, it makes me feel attacked, it makes me feel unsafe.” Then you look at someone like Jack, who says himself, “I live a very stressful life.” You look at Timucin, who seems also to live a stressful life on some level. It doesn’t seem like [the answer’s] as simple as that. Obviously there’s much more going on there than simply wanting to make a thesis for the world that is consistent…I don’t know why necessarily one type of person chooses one ideology and one chooses another, but I think that’s a critical question that he raises there and that I hope people walk out of the film with.

When I’m thinking about this idea of, “Why do we form our ideologies?” I always find that likely that answer is one based in our DNA, perhaps a chemical in our brain that tells us this is the thing we are supposed to care about. Because of that, [the derivation of our ideologies] is almost entirely unknowable.

Scientists, I think, are trying to figure out where that part of the brain is, the belief part, the religious part.

We’re able to look at our experiences, understand how our experiences affect us, but some of our eventual conclusions about life, about the world—how exactly, or why exactly, one person believes one thing and one person another is kind of mysterious. A little bit of that is alive in the movie in the last sequence. The last shot of the movie is of those two people who are obviously not part of the 9/11 Truth Movement; they are just standing there with a picture of some family member or friend who died, and they are overwhelmed in this sea of violence and global movements that are vast and very difficult to understand. Why seventeen guys would have wanted to crash a plane into those buildings with a bunch of peaceful civilians in them is inconceivable, especially if you live in America.

The world is a vast and confusing place, and we’re all in the midst of it. I actually think that anyone who claims that the conspiracy theorists are lost in the midst of it are missing the fact that they are probably just as lost. They hold an ideology that they believe explains the world in some clear, delineated way, and they somehow see themselves as different from the conspiracy theorists in that regard. But, in fact, they’re functioning on the exact same mental process; it’s just a difference in how they interpret the data.

One of the ironies of the film for me, and I think it’s a very beautiful irony because it seems so very true, is that Alex always talks of this revolution of peaceful information, and yet it seems as if the way in which he goes about getting this peaceful information out is very aggressive. I don’t mean to say that it’s violent, but it’s certainly aggressive. I think particularly of the sequence of Alex continually talking over the man who’s called into the radio show, telling this caller about the pigs, equating the police with piggies. I don’t know if that contradiction is always necessary, that in order to assume a state of peace there is a state of aggression that has to come with that.

That’s a tough one. As you said, Alex is a nonviolent person; he preaches nonviolence. Yet the way in which he gets his word out is extremely aggressive. I think for people who feel as though their message is being lost in the glut of information out there, they feel like they need to speak louder. A lot of conspiracy theorists look to Alex to be that guy to speak louder. Not everyone has the energy or capacity to do that, and he does.

It’s the peaceful revolution problem. It’s the revolution problem period, right?…There is always potentially a tragic possibility with activism, with revolutionaries of one sort or another—not that Alex is a revolutionary—and with people who want to change the system because it will be better for everybody, there is always a danger that it can get carried away and become violent. I actually think that unfairly gets applied to the conspiracy theorist population, and they get cast off as potentially dangerous. That’s nonsense. Of course there are dangerous people in the world, and some believe in far-out stuff, but to imply that anyone who believes in conspiracy theories is potentially dangerous is absurd.

Look, Alex predicted 9/11; he also predicted this economic crash. He’s onto something. In a democracy, dissenting voices are very valuable. I’m glad that Alex Jones exists; I’m glad that his voice exists in this society. I think it’s necessary and important. You don’t always have to agree with it if he’s not always right, but the counterbalance to the generally accepted principles about why people are doing what they are doing is important.

If anyone doesn’t think that people are sitting around, getting together and colluding in order to manipulate a system to their advantage, I think that person is naïve. We collude all the time. It’s our behavior. I collude everyday. I collude to get my movies made. I collude to convince my friends to come out for a drink with me. Collusion and conspiracy are how we operate, so I think it’s important when you’re dealing with a massive, bureaucratic government, like the one that we have, to always have that thought in the back of your mind, to be aware of the fact that people are, to at least some extent, self-interested. It’s not only for those ends but in part. So the fact that Alex gets people to think about that is maybe a good thing. In a way it’s the old “Question Authority” bumper sticker, which, as corny as it is a bumper sticker, I’ve always believed in.

Off that point, I don’t wholly agree with Alex’s assertions about the modern day lack of muckraking journalism, but certainly the lack of money in mainstream media has made it very difficult to see a diversity of independent surveys. All regional papers, for the most part now, are slaves to the wire.

In the film, one of the greatest moments that comments on this, another irony in a different manner, is the group protest at the Geraldo show. Here you’ve got Geraldo back in the 1970s with some bit of credibility as perhaps what Alex might have termed a muckraking journalist, and then these thirty-five so years later, he’s standing beside these dyed-hair, make-up plastered women talking about trivialities, wearing short skirts on an airplane, I think? It’s just a great humorous moment to hear this commentator saying, “This is the ugliest group of protesters I’ve ever seen,” and obviously these made-up lunatics on Geraldo look equally awful.

You’re tapping into one of the essential elements of the film for me. Anyone who is going to claim that conspiracy theorists are crazy, take a look at the world around you. We’re surrounded by madness, by Geraldo, by Iraq, by cruise missiles, by clips on YouTube of anonymous people being mutilated with .50 caliber machine guns from two miles away. The world is mad. It’s a crazy convolution and collision of multiple, incongruent ideologies.

But it always has been.

Yes, it always has been, but it’s intensifying. There are more ideologies. There are more modes of communication, more ways to express yourself, more divergent voices. Out there it’s insane. I turn on the television, and sometimes I’m absolutely confused. I’m totally confused by madness…Everyone is just bouncing around in this echo chamber of information that’s so available, and I think that produces a somewhat manic world.

Whether you believe that it’s an organized conspiracy, or whether you believe that it’s just happening, globalization is one of the most powerful forces, if not the most powerful force, acting upon human societies right now. It’s changing the way we live in a radical way in a very short period of time. This film is a study of that process in action.

Earlier you mentioned the importance of leaving a film with questions. With this film, what is the one most pressing question that you are left to ask yourself?

How is man going to cope in the mess that we have created for ourselves? When I finished this movie, I thought to myself, “My God, what will become of us? What is going to become of us?” I fear for our future. A little bit.

Outside the wind in Park City blows cold while inside here, in this tiny restaurant nestled away from the film festival hubbub of Main Street, filmmaker David Lowery slips off his jacket as he scans though the menu’s vegan options. In town for the Slamdance screening of his graceful, thought-provoking short film A Catalog of Anticipations, Lowery, more than this year ago now, bounces from venue to venue, sledding expedition to premiere party all the while returning to his hotel room in the breaks between to prep production for his debut feature film St. Nick.

Set in an isolated Texan winter landscape, the debut, which like Lowery’s shorts is as equally graceful and thought-provoking a mystery, follows a pair of adolescent sibling runaways who, for no seemingly better reason than that they can, trek out on their own self-reliant whim. Too young to understand the world as it is and yet too old to fully embrace the blind innocence of childhood again, the two scrape by, salvaging food from dumpsters and setting up shelter in an abandoned house. While aesthetically captivating and elegant, its shot design as experimental as it is fluent, St. Nick is undeniably a film composed of several provocative ideas and moments. It’s not always an easy film to understand, and that’s exactly, Lowery mentions now, just a few weeks left before the film’s premiere at South by Southwest, what he was after.

I love this notion in the Director’s Statement that you realized you were growing up on the first day of kindergarten, this idea that from that point on you’d have to wake up early. What was it like to be in that mindset as a child, and why do you think that idea occurred to you at that young age?

I wasn’t trying to make a happy film about childhood, and that was based on my own feelings. I remember being upset a lot as a kid, and so as I was trying to address all of that, it occurred to me that maybe that idea was tied into this [fear and anger] somehow. It seemed like a dynamic related. There was another moment I remember going up to my room and trying to knock myself out with a two-by-four; I was ten years old. So that’s an equally valid explanation of where the movie came from I think.

I was feeling a lot of resentment and other emotions when I was developing the project. That, I think, comes first. I had the idea for the movie, I was making it and then all of that emotion further came out as I was working on it. It wasn’t the driving force behind it, but it welled up as I was making it or preparing to make it.

The particularly scary element for me about this emotion is that for the boy, played by [Tucker Sears], his anger is never explained, and now this makes me wonder if even you can pinpoint why it is that as a child you felt that fear and anger.

Maybe it’s that I was afraid of growing up. I’m still terrified of growing up. I have a long ways to go in that regard, and I’m sure everybody probably feels that way. But, I can’t put a finger on it. It’s a vague, elusive cloak of emotions that you are just wrestling with. Maybe other people don’t feel that, but for me, it’s not specific. It’s hard to describe. I’m sure there’s a psychologist out there who could answer these questions for me, but I wasn’t trying to make a movie about why these things happen or why people feel this way; the fact of the matter is that they do, and that’s what I was trying to capture.

I like that approach, just in the sense that most filmmakers, I feel, who try to pull that, “Why?” off can’t get the message across. Yet in the traditional narrative set-up, there need to be exposition and explanation; the audience is constantly searching for the reason that events happen. In this movie, however, it’s nice to find that I never question that you don’t explore that, “Why?” I was too well immersed in the, “What? What is going on? What is going to happen?” It never truly occurred to me to think about the “Why?”

We did a test screening, and a lot of people do try to find a reason. People can make their own judgments. As far as I’m concerned, those parents are the most loving, caring parents in the world, and that has nothing to do with why the kids left. People like to prescribe these reasons. That’s the way it’s going to work, and they can ask me if they’re right. If that’s what they need to appreciate the movie more, that’s fine.

I never fully got the impression that [Savanna Tucker’s] character, the sister, wanted to leave the house in the first place. Rather, I got the impression that she was tagging along as moral support for her brother, and that idea is well-captured in those first lines of the film, about the sandwich he made for her not being very good. It was almost as if that line was less a judgment about what he was able to make for her than about what was present in his entire character, that she, as his sister, didn’t approve of his entire character.

She’s more of a cipher than he is, for sure. She stays level throughout the whole movie. I don’t know if she went along with him to provide moral support, or if he brought her along because he thought he needed her. Either-or works for me, but whatever his reason is for leaving, she doesn’t share it. They are not together in that, and the more the situation plays out, what I tried to do over the course of the movie is to show them gradually growing apart. He’s realizing, or not even realizing but coming to terms with the fact that, she’s not participating in whatever this is.

Well, there is a two year age difference between the two.

That’s part of it too. I remember the point at which my younger brothers and I ceased to become compatible as buddies because that little bit of age difference pushes you past one another in a way; it excludes you from that former circle.

That maturation process intrigues me, and in the last shots of this film, all I was left to reflect upon about this was this notion that if perhaps Tucker’s character was right to leave from the beginning, that, in just a few years, Savanna’s character would come to understand why he was right. There’s a joviality to the last shot, just because it speaks to so much security, but I also got an impression there of the impending hardship that her character would come to suffer, likely alone.

The flip side of that is that she’s where she needs to be, and that’s a happy ending, and that he, for even as rough a place as he might be in at the end, is, technically speaking, is where he feels he needs to be. So, looking from that perspective, this could be a happy ending even though it’s a very disconcerting one.

…The film has a whimsy to it; that’s undeniable. It’s not a hard movie to watch, I hope, and I hope it’s entertaining at times, but I definitely had to take a knot out of my stomach and put it in there in the movie. So, I hope, at least, it leaves people feeling a little unsettled in a way but not in a traditional, “Oh, abused children…” I wanted it to be purely psychological.

Along with that whimsy is a sense humor that the film has at points, and the moment that best describes this is the one in which Tucker, who I believe is talking about the passage of time and trying to get very philosophical, gets hit by a handful of dirt that Savanna wallops at him.

(laughs, remembering) Yeah, he’s talking about death in that scene.

That scene wasn’t written. We went out to the backyard, and I gave Tucker a few ideas for lines, “Say something like this,” and Savanna just responded however she responded. Eventually she’d just throw mud at him, and that was it, just those two being the characters and expressing their feelings on that topic. It’s probably my favorite scene in the movie, and it was completely just us coming up with the idea five minutes before shooting it, shot it and that was it.

It seems that much of the film came about in that way, as happy accidents, moments that you weren’t expecting, or in images that the crew on second unit might find. How as a filmmaker do you cultivate that much trust to work with your cast and crew in such fluid way that allows for that creativity without also getting scared that you’ll not have time to shoot the coverage needed for scripted material?

The script is only thirty pages long actually, and I went back to look at it earlier today for the first time since we shot. It was really rough. There are scenes where it just says, “Maybe this happens.” There were multiple scenes, which were alternate ideas, for various ways the story could go, and there were just sentences that generally described, “The kids talk about this.” I had a clear idea of the narrative arc of the movie, and so I never locked myself into specific scenes for the most part. There were certain scenes that I knew were going to happen, they were put on the shooting schedule, and some of them made it into the movie and some of them didn’t. With other scenes, I just found people I trusted. I found two kids who I knew were perfect, that whatever they did, it would be the right thing.

When I wrote the outline of [St. Nick], the boy was supposed to be fourteen or fifteen, a lot older, but then once we found Tucker and Savanna, I said, “I’m going to make the characters that age. I’d rather see what he brings to that part as opposed to trying to shoehorn someone into what I’d had in mind originally.” So it was just about surrounding myself with people I really trusted with whom I could just say, “I have an idea for a scene. Go shoot this.” Then they’d bring it back, and usually it would be amazing. We shot probably enough footage to make another movie entirely, double the length easily. Then, it was just finding, out of all of that footage, the right moment. I really just had a crew of people that I trusted intimately, and I knew that they would get good material. They understood what I wanted to do, and they found little bits and pieces that would get into my vision.

I wanted to work that way because working with kids, it was partially practical. They can only work a certain number of hours a day, and I also wanted to keep them focused, not have them get bored while we were setting up lights. So if we had a big scene that had a complicated lighting set-up, we’d go out in the backyard and just shot something else while we were prepping. Or, I remember shooting a scene with Tucker all by himself, and while we were shooting that, I had my DP [Clay Liford] shot the marshmellow sandwich scene with Savanna. It was just about trying to maximize time to get as much material as possible. In a way, it’s like shooting a documentary; you just want to make sure you have an abundance of footage to draw from, and although a lot of it was very planned out, my vision of the film also encapsulated plenty of fly-on-the-wall moments. So it didn’t need to be 100 percent planned out.

That’s interesting to me in the sense that the narrative was so taut that it felt almost hyper-written. I say that in the most complimentary way; to a certain extent, I love being able to watch a movie and almost read the screenplay in my head simultaneously. That was definitely the feeling I had here, that the film had the qualities of a really good short story.

I used to think of myself as a writer, although now I don’t. I think of myself as a director, and I use the script so that we can have a plan and some structure. I just try to get enough down on paper to let everybody know what the feeling of the story is and let them know what is going to happen. So much of it is just in my head as images. I think like an editor. I think in terms of juxtaposed images and all the meaning that comes out of two images clashed up against each other, or a single shot that lasts for a certain amount of time. You can’t really write that very well, and so I write enough of a script to create a plan that will allow me to then make that film that’s in my head. If it were just me making the film by myself—like I do with my short films—I wouldn’t write at all.

As I’ve sat on the film for a few days now, I’m beginning to notice what pieces of it are sticking with me, and I find myself so much more drawn to the story and atmosphere now that the hesitations I felt, when first watching the film, about Savanna’s and Tucker’s performances and then particularly about the choice to shoot on digital have faded somewhat. With that said, those concerns still hold valid for the way in which a first time viewer might see this film.

The idea of Tucker and Savanna holding up the entire emotional breadth of the film is still a bit of a stretch for me. For example, in the scene with Tucker and [musician and vocalist of Bosque Brown] Mara Lee Miller, although it’s a beautifully built scene, there’s still some feeling wanting, some sort of longing or hopefulness that I just didn’t see reflected in him at that moment.

As the director, I know you completely stand behind these performances, but how exactly did you work with the two kids on an emotional level? Do you feel that you got the emotional breadth out of them that you’d hoped for?

I feel I did. There were scenes that I didn’t feel the performances worked, and I cut them out, any of those scenes where I really felt that they were acting. Like you said, I’m completely behind what’s in the movie now, and any fault that people find with the performances, I would place that on myself. I’m not the best at communicating with actors. I don’t have that particular skill in the way that other directors do.

For the scene that you’re talking about—when I was watching Tucker’s performance, I was always just looking at what led me to cast him in the first place, which is that you can always tell that something is going on in his head a million miles a minute. He’s got these twitches of his face that say more to me than any of the dialogue does. The dialogue is a placeholder, and that’s why I let [the actors] say whatever they wanted to a lot of the time. In that scene, I love his performance; there’s a weird awkwardness to it.

In terms of working with [Tucker and Savanna], they never read the script. I would tell them what the scene was about right before we started shooting, and I’d say, “We’re going to do a scene where this happens now.” If there was dialogue, I would give them some lines that we printed out. We’d talk about it, and they’d read it out loud, but I wouldn’t let them memorize it. I don’t know what they thought of it a lot of the times. I have a feeling, because I think kids are smart, that they got a lot of what was going on, but I think that they also were unable to perceive the larger picture of what I had in mind. So at the same time that they might have understood a given scene, they wouldn’t understand how it would fit in conjunction with everything else. It was very much in the moment for them. Like the scene in which Savanna throws the dirt, it was just about however they reacted naturally; that was what I was after.

I’m wondering now too if seeing the film on a large screen television by myself as opposed to seeing it on a film screen with an audience renders the performances unjustly overly subtle. That too might be a limiting factor in my perception, and hence not so much your fault as the fault of formatting, how it is exactly that you’re seeing this film.

To a certain extent, yes, there are certain movies which I love that I would never recommend anybody to watch on TV, that I’d say, “You need to see this on a big screen without distraction.” That’s the film I aspire to make. I love to see my work on the big screen, but the fact of the matter is that most people who see this movie by and large will see it on television, probably by themselves with all the myriad distractions that life offers. If they’ve missed things, that’s not their fault. If I’ve made the film too subtly, that’s not anyone’s fault; that’s just the way the film is. It is really subtle, and I can’t really apologize for that. But, I can understand people not picking up on things or getting lost in the story in the way that I hoped they would. The fact of the matter is that that doesn’t always happen.

What I do hope, like you’re saying, is that there are certain moments that you remember. I really think that’s valuable. I endeavor to make films that last in people’s heads, to make films that don’t go down easily, that stick in your throat and remain undigested. Those are the films that I remember, and a lot of times they are imperfect films. They make you really question what the director was thinking. So you see a good film, you can tell that there’s quality to the direction punching through the narrative and that there’s clearly a steady hand behind it, but then there’s something that just rubs you the wrong way. That sticks with you. “Why did the director do that? It doesn’t make sense to me.” You think about those things over and over again, and maybe, eventually, you like that style, or maybe you don’t. That’s the kind of work I appreciate, films that make me think in that way.

I set out to make a film like that, and even in the script there are scenes that I included that I felt would serve that purpose. Through the production, and especially in the editing, I went after things like that. I tried to make it fairly thorny and not a 100 percent digestible, both narratively and formally. I like to put weirder stakes in. In that scene where Tucker is climbing out of the dumpster, there’s a shot that follows him after a long delay. It felt like an over-camera movement; it just didn’t feel right. The more and more I left it in, the more that I wanted to because it sticks out, and it somehow makes the film more memorable and special because it has a flaw like that. I like rough edges, and I like imperfection. I want things to feel handmade and have those fingerprints to them… So, if parts of the film felt incorrect to you, or against what you thought my intentions were, that’s good. I hope that it sticks with you and doesn’t fade from your memory, that the parts that are easy to digest will fade away and the parts that are harder will remain.

I do want to speak about the editing for both this film and Kris Swanberg’s debut feature It was great, but I was ready to come home, which is also premiering at South by Southwest. I love the editing in both, and you made the very simple comment to me in a passing e-mail that you edit in the only way that you know how, that it’s organic for you to make the choices that you do. How is it that you went about editing both of these films?

With my film it was a pretty long process. After we shot it, I didn’t look at it for about a month, and then over the course of three months I made a cut that was pretty close to what you see now, although originally it was 25 minutes longer. So I start at the beginning and then just keep going.

To me filmmaking is my way of playing music. I’m a frustrated musician. I can’t play the piano as well as I’d like to be able to, so I make movies instead. It’s all about rhythm and pace. I hold on a shot for as long as it needs to be held, and the pace dictates when to cut away. It’s very mathematical in the same way that music is and also very organic, beautiful and natural in the way that music is. You run into problems when you try to edit to solve problems. I don’t like doing that because then you’re forced to take that rhythm and pace. But, if you shot correctly, you don’t have to solve problems. You just cut the way the film needs to be cut. I did have to do some problem solving with this film because the shooting was so haphazard, and I knew that going in. I’d have to figure things out, rearrange things, but whenever a scene felt like it required too much work or had too many edits, in general I’d just lose the scene because that was not my idea of how the film would go…I just go with what’s right and feel my way along. I’ve got an internal metronome that kicks back and forth, and I just cut to that. That goes all the way back to the fact that I have a vision of how scenes will cut together when I’m conceiving the project; I have that pace that’s always in my head. If I could write with a timeline and specify how these things go, I would. But, that’s how I think, and formally speaking I think that music is more of an influence on me than other movies are.

With Kris’ movie, I cut that in four days. It was really, really fast. I cut a little bit while we were shooting, and then a week after we shot it, I flew to Chicago and cut the whole thing. It was fairly simple, and again on that film, any scene that was giving me trouble, we said, “Alright that scene is not going to work. Let’s just get rid of it.” That movie doesn’t have the same confrontational quality that mine does because Kris is not confrontational in her filmmaking. She doesn’t have that interest in the stories that she wants to tell. And so, with that film, it was much more about trying to make it flow like water, make it move gracefully from one scene to the next all the way up to the ending. It was important to me that as much as there might be a three-act structure to the movie—and I think the three-act structure is just inherent to any narrative—I wanted to make no scene anymore important than any other. We cut out a lot of scenes where there was an incident happening because those scenes called attention to themselves, and the funny thing is that a lot of those scenes were my ideas on the set. It was like, “Oh, we should have this happen. This will connect Point A to Point B in an interesting way.” But, ultimately anything that felt like a contrivance or felt written, as if it was a part of a script, we cut those out. For me that film, and part of this is that we cut so quickly, feels like an exhale. The entire story comes out in one long exhalation. That gracefulness was what I was after.

I’m amazed by all aspects of the filmmaking process but particularly the way in which moments, nuances in a film often develop unconsciously. Things happen with purpose, and yet that purpose is not always understood. That’s why I find it so interesting to ask filmmakers if these certain nuances were intentional, and I often find that they weren’t intentional at all.

That’s what I love about movies too. There’s a lot of work that I do which I try to be very intentional with, and that’s very pointed. But, that only goes to a certain extent, and I don’t think about it beyond a certain point. If my gut tells me that [a scene] needs to be there, I trust that, and that’s how it ends up in the movie.

Because I write criticism and think about film in a very analytical way, it’s very easy for me to explain my own work, but it’s also really scary. I don’t need to wear two hats in that way. I made the film. If someone else finds something in it worth talking about, I would love to hear it, but I don’t need to explain it. Everything I’ve wanted to say is already there.

So, as a parting question, what is one funny story from the set?

(laughs) When we were shooting the last scene of the movie, or second to last, I guess, with Tucker at the train yard, [we were shooting on] this big hill in Ft. Worth that overlooks this massive Union Pacific train yard that just goes on for miles. In the script I wrote that he actually goes into the train yard and gets on a train, but we couldn’t actually get permission to shoot that. We tried for a while to get permission, but it’s practically impossible for a low-budget independent film to get that insurance. So we just reconceived the moment with Tucker looking at the trains.

So we shot that off this main road in Ft. Worth. There’s a little dirt road you can pull up onto to park your car and look at these trains. It’s probably private property, but it’s off the side of the road, so we thought, “Oh, we’re good.” It’s me, [James M. Johnston, the producer] and Tucker who go to shoot this, and his mom offered to stay back at the production house. James is waiting by the car while I’m off shooting, and we were there maybe 30 minutes. We get back in the car, pull away and immediately after we pull back on the main road, a cop, who’s coming in the opposite direction, does a U-turn and starts following us. I’m like, “Okay, he thinks we were trespassing.” He doesn’t pull us over so we just keep driving. He’s right behind us, and we keep driving, driving, heading the two miles back to the house.

We’re almost back when he finally turns his lights on, we pull over, and that’s when I realized that there are three or four other cop cars there as well. He’d been waiting for backup. When I rolled my window down and heard him say, “Driver, please get out of the car,” I realized that they all had their guns pulled and pointed at me. They asked me what we were doing, and I said, “We’re making a film,” trying to sound cool and collected. They asked me who were the people in the car, and I explain as they pat me down, check me for weapons, have me get in the back of their car and lock me up.

I see them do the same thing to James. They get him out of the car, and everything that happened after that I get from him. They pat him down, tell him to get down on the curb and start going through my car. I can see that they were talking to Tucker, and James told me that they were asking him all the same questions that they were asking us, just seeing if all of our stories corroborated.

Eventually they let me out of the car and said that everything was okay but that someone had reported that they saw two men leading a kid into the woods at gunpoint. At one point I was following Tucker with the camera, walking down the hill with him, and so we figured that maybe they thought the camera was a gun. Then James was back by the car with the lens cap under his arm, which maybe they thought was a holster. This person obviously has seen far too many mafia movies.