Sunday Extra: Interview with Aaron Katz of "Quiet City" (original) (raw)

If you're a filmmaker and you've got $5,000, there are a few things you could do.

You could hire Tom Cruise for one-four-thousandth of the time and money he usually gets to appear in a movie.

You could rent a set of lights and generators and rigging for maybe a week.

You could buy, shoot and process about 15 minutes of 35mm film.

You could feed your cast and crew burritos three times a day for two weeks or so.

Or, if you're Aaron Katz (above), a 25-year-old writer-director from Portland, you could create not one but two of the most exciting and beautifully crafted small films of the year.
Katz's "Quiet City," which is playing at the Hollywood Theatre, and his "Dance Party USA," which passed through town earlier this year, have been celebrated as part of the so-called "mumblecore" movement, a loosely defined group of independent films by and about twentysomethings that has been gathering heat and ink in New York, where Katz lives. And superficially, the two films share with their mumblecore peers (they include such titles as "The Puffy Chair," "Funny Ha Ha" and "Mutual Appreciation") a tendency toward semi-plots, improvised dialogue, low-key acting, and an aversion to pretense and sheen that's at once studied and off-handed.

But as a moviemaker, Katz stands well above the crowd for his eye, his sense of editing rhythm, his musicality, his sheer artistic chops. There are moments of pure poetry in both of his movies -- and you can go to film school the rest of your life and never learn how to make a single shot or scene as lovely as the ones he turns out again and again in these films.

As it happens, Katz did attend film school, at the North Carolina School of the Arts. But his film education began at Portland's Pacific Crest Community School, where Barry Hunt of Sowelu Theater was among his teachers.

"A lot of what I do is informed by stuff that he taught me," Katz said in a recent phone interview. "Especially the ideas of how I wrote 'Quiet City' -- writing fast and trusting my instincts."

To write "Quiet City," in fact, Katz had to trust not only his instincts but also his actors, Erin Fisher and Cris Lankenau, who created much of their dialogue within scenes that Katz had mapped out.

"I had a full 120-page script," he recalled, "but when it came time to shoot it, everything was in the actors' own words. The structure compares to the script scene by scene, but the things that happen in each scene happened through the actors. A lot of times, things would happen in the first take that would be unexpected, and we would talk about how to incorporate them into the scene."

You've got to be an extremely confident filmmaker -- or a very naive one -- to pull off that sort of work, as Katz himself knows. "On 'Dance Party,' " he said, "we stuck to the script about 95 percent of the time."

But that film's festival success gave him a boost of confidence. Consider the pace at which he's been working: "Dance Party" was written in 2002, filmed in Portland in 2004, edited in 2005 and finally premiered at the South by Southwest Festival in March 2006. In comparison, "Quiet City" was written in August 2006, shot during eight days in October and edited quickly enough to premiere at the March 2007 South by Southwest.

Katz acknowledged that the response to "Dance Party" impelled him forward.

"People liking the film really helped," he said. "And (Brendan McFadden, who produced both films) has a can-do attitude and said it would be easy to be satisfied with 'Dance Party' but that we should try to make something new. And I met other filmmakers at South by Southwest whose work I liked. And talking to them got me excited to do something."

For all the speed with which "Quiet City" was made, though, it wasn't the first thing Katz conceived as his second project.

"I wrote something else that got really, really long," he said, "and it wasn't working. And I was at a layover at the airport in Cincinnati, and I decided to abandon it. And I bought a new notebook and wrote 'Quiet City' in a week."

Even though he is emerging as a singular talent, Katz has been pigeonholed by critics not only because of the whole mumblecore thing, but also because his films have some resemblances to the work of an older generation of American independent filmmakers. Specifically, the cinematography of "Dance Party" resembles that of Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" ("Dance Party" even has a protagonist named Gus), and the boy-meets-and-chats-with-girl story of "Quiet City" recalls Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset."

Katz conceded that he could see why viewers made those connections.

"I'd kind of like to shake it, but I don't mind it that much," he said. "Truth be told, 'Dance Party' was partly inspired by 'Elephant' -- we'd been discussing how to do it -- but, then, Gus Van Sant was inspired by (Hungarian director) Bela Tarr. On the whole, there's probably more borrowed from 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' than from 'Elephant.' As far as 'Before Sunrise,' that was nothing I thought about in the writing process. The influence was more just us talking about things and what we happened to see recently. Things filter in. I had just seen (Michelangelo Antonioni's) "La Notte," and I'm sure some of that filtered in."

Whatever influences Katz has absorbed, he's transformed them through the strength of his craft into something entirely his own. He's dreaming up a larger film and hoping to attract established actors and proper financing for it. Based on what he's done with 5,000,thethoughtofwhathemightdowith,oh,5,000, the thought of what he might do with, oh, 5,000,thethoughtofwhathemightdowith,oh,2 million is dazzling.

If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.