Q&A with filmmaker Julian C. Santos, Part II

11.09.20

How did the ideas for the short films you wrote and directed, Le Temps Perdu and Cruel, germinate? Those you both wrote and directed, right?

Correct. Basically, I started directing short films in high school around the same time I started directing theatre. Eventually, because I pursued a film degree in college, I wound up directing more film than theatre.  

Le Temps Perdu, what I shot in Paris, I still am definitely proud of because it required me to persevere over a language barrier and also write a story in a different language. I had to make sure the ideas of the script, the story was universal enough that an all-French cast would be like, “Oh, this still makes sense to me. That this story still resonates with me and is not just so specific to my American experience.”

Cruel was a shorter exercise than Le Temps Perdu and was based off a theatre script I’d written in high school. It was a little character-driven piece that helped me better learn how to work with actors and take criticism where the script wasn’t quite landing and learn how to use the rehearsal process as kind of the last draft of rewriting, to make sure that what you’re seeing is what you want to get on screen.

Another one of the valuable things that YPT taught me was the power of rehearsal. Obviously, if you took a group of kids and told them to do a show and gave them no rehearsal time, the results would be interesting. But I think rehearsal is just such a key to helping actors feel comfortable, to helping crew feel like they’ve actually found the story and a director to be like, “Ok, this is the story I want to tell.” There’s not as much fluff. It lets you get your hands dirty in the fun process of creating without the time pressure of: “Oh, this is, literally, a live show.” Or: “Oh, we are filming right now and there’s only so much film or digital storage space we have.”

Then right after college, I proceeded to do another short written by the cowriter of The Last Christmas Party [Kevin Nittolo], called Six Feet After. This was the first thing made by the production company [City Bear Media, cofounded by Julian and Benjamin Goebel], our first time trying to do a short completely outside of NYU but of the quality that NYU did. That was very important to us. We wanted to make something that looked fairly polished, like I could have done this for a class. It was a big educational experience in dealing with things like rental insurance and rental companies, in general. You don’t have NYU behind you to say, “Oh, don’t worry. This is an NYU production, so trust us.” You need to convince people to work on this production.

Six Feet After, aside from being a great test of Kevin’s writing, also helped us find crew members who we later worked with again on The Last Christmas Party. It’s like, “Oh, we loved collaborating with you and that you’re also down with continuing to make stuff outside of college, so let’s all make a bigger thing together.”

Could you give the thumbnail plot summary?

Six Feet After is about a guy who starts dating his dead best friend’s girlfriend, kind of all the complications from that, about overcoming the baggages a lot of people just have going into relationships. How do you look past that and do you overcome that or do you not?

What was the genesis of The Last Christmas Party and how you got to know your cowriter, Kevin Nittolo?

The Last Christmas Party started when I was studying abroad in London. I was doing a class called Advanced Screenwriting, where you write a feature-length script. For three months, I wrote an entirely different script that I eventually completely discarded. I finished it, but I just wasn’t in love with it. It was a much more conventional love story: protagonist man meets protagonist woman and they have a love story. Whereas, with The Last Christmas Party, I wanted to do more of an ensemble piece — and I’m not fluffing this — based on YPT, where every role really does matter.

It’s basically the story of three couples during a college Christmas party and how their stories intertwine. We wanted to portray a really authentic picture of what it was like to feel like you’re in love in college and the ups and downs of that, to make something that felt authentic to people our age and to our experiences.

I wrote the initial draft for class. It went over fine, but I knew the script could be better. Kevin was a classmate at Tisch. I brought him on, because I knew he was such as good writer, to work with me to help make this story distinctive and feel real. Because it was so naturalistic, we really wanted each moment to feel authentic.

We spent a year spitballing and revising, which seems like a long time. But to really get a script feeling good, you want to give it the time it deserves. I think that a lot of problems people our age run into is that they get antsy and want to quickly write a script and make it. And they have a thousand regrets afterwards, in terms of specific ways they could take the story. We wanted to circumvent that. We even did a full read-through of a draft of The Last Christmas Party. We cast it and wanted to see our friends’ reactions, just hearing the performances. Also, on my end, learning to work with actors on some of these characters. And we retold the story quite a bit after that. We’d find, like, ok, this character is just not working; we need to re-conceptualize who he is. Or: This character is working, so maybe we should give them a bit more screen time, make them a bit more prominent.

The creative process of rewriting and workshopping was painful. It was arduous. But at the same time, it was a lot of fun and set us up for success in terms of giving us a baseline of a script that we were really happy with. A year seems like a long time but is fairly realistic, even accounting for the fact that this was our first feature. We were still learning a lot of what we were doing. To not rush ourselves into making a worse product, was very important, I think. To that end, we went through an eight-round casting process. It was a lot of casting before, Ok, we’re happy with these people and know they feel dedicated to the project and, importantly, like the story and their characters enough that they’d be willing to rehearse, in order to make a better performance at the end of the day. We approached it like a stage play, in terms of rehearsals. The year also encompassed that.

What was the audition process like?

Casting director is a thing I sometimes do that I just love, because you get to meet people. Also, you get to see different takes on a character and it gives you new ideas. I don’t want to make it so binary, but even a bad audition can still be enlightening: “Oh, wow, I don’t want this character to be like that.” Or: “Oh, I hated this but I liked that aspect of their performance.”

NYU gives us casting resources, access to a casting website. I think we got 1,500 responses. We were able to bring in about 200, definitely enough to have a good pool and not settle for the first person who comes through the door who does something remotely good. Because it was an ensemble, we wanted team players who were able to bounce off of other actors. One thing we did, which was slightly unorthodox, was that we always had actors come in in pairs. So it’s like, “Ok, you’re not just performing a monologue to a reader. You’re not just responding to a reader. You need to actually react to another actor and play off them.”

As the rounds went on, those eventually just turned into chemistry tests. There several wonderful performers who just didn’t have chemistry with the rest of the cast. It was unfortunate, but it was good that we saw that so early on.

We chose people who actually enjoyed this whole process. But it was funny. The actors who did the read-through also came in to audition for the actual movie, and it was competitive. A lot ended up being dethroned from their parts. One actor in particular just took ownership of the role and continued to nail it, in the read-through and audition after audition. We were like, “We put you through the ringer so much, but the role is yours forever and ever.”

How did you come up with the idea for the film?

A lot of it is experience from friends and personal experience. In telling something we wanted to feel realistic, we were like, “Well, we should cull, at least partially, from our own lives and not sugarcoat that.” That was very important to me and the cowriter, to not have it be: “Oh, this is the happy rendition of what I remember college being like” — the saccharin rendition.

This is a bunch of people with different wants, in different places in their love lives, bumping up against each other, and this is what happens over a short period of time. What is going to happen at this party with these friends?

Some of the first draft did stay intact. There are a few scenes that are like, “Oh, that is still that initial spark.” But other stuff definitely evolved.

The narrative technique of replaying the party from the perspective of each couple… Was that something that came about later on? It seems very integral now to the buzz around the movie.

To be honest, the first draft of the script was written linearly — what happened throughout the night, chronologically. And the next few drafts were also linear. It wasn’t until rehearsals — that far in — that we realized the best way to tell this story would be to split it up by couples and show the night from three different perspectives. It allowed us to control how you perceived a character and a different plot line. You see one aspect of them in this plot line. Maybe you see the nagging roommate, at first. But then you realize, in their specific section, they’ve got a lot more going on and deserve to be a bit nagging.

It was one of those great moments that was a weird suggestion. I was joking, in fact, when I said to my cowriter: “What if we do it completely out of chronological order and just do section by section? Maybe this will solve some of the pre-existing pacing issues.” Once we hit on that idea and worked it out, it just helped tremendously. And, crucially, we didn’t tell the actors that this was going to be non-chronological order. They didn’t find that out until they’d been shown a cut of the film. Because, we didn’t want that to color how they performed a certain scene, in terms of, oh, forcing this person to look more antagonistic and over-intellectualizing it. We really wanted it to be like, “No, you guys aren’t playing any metaphors here — we’ll deal with that on our end — and be sure that you’re giving us what we think we need for this section of the story.”

It [the switch in narrative technique] was two months before we actually shot. That definitely made us have to think about the visual style, because that would unfold in non-linear order. “Ok, how do we shoot this thing for this order?” It was kind of like having two stories in your mind, but I do think it is one of the strongest parts of the movie. Otherwise, it’s like any sitcom would tell the drama of one night. We wanted to tell it in a bit more of an interesting fashion.

Do you have a strategy for getting onto the film festival map?

Definitely a lot of luck and doing your research. It’s a bit overwhelming, to be honest. My cowriter, Ben and I went to some of these festivals and would ask ourselves, “Is this a place we’d want The Last Christmas Party to play? Is this a good fit for the film? Or is this festival much more interested in things that have Ryan Gosling in them? That have much more star power than we can afford.” Just being realistic about that helped inform which festivals we applied to.

Definitely, learning what your film means to others, to strangers, was very helpful. We test-screened for friends of friends and people who knew next to nothing about the project to get, from their perspective, what stands out about the film and what is strong and what is weak. I think that helped, in applying to these festivals, to be like, “Ok, this is kind of the angle which we think you may be interested in.” To be able to condense those into good talking points.

But definitely, festival things we are still figuring out. We’re waiting to hear back from three dozen festivals, still. So, it’s a long game. Because, unlike college, it’s not like there’s a synchronization or certain sections of the year where you find out. It’s rolling admission all throughout the year that you get the good news or the bad. Covid definitely has affected things and slowed some festivals down.

Do you imagine that Covid impacts the structure of film or theatre, at least in the next couple of years as far as having to either put your actors through rigorous testing or quarantining them or blocking things so that they appropriately distanced?

Film is struggling to find how do you make film during Covid. The positive thing is, people have a lot more time to write scripts, and that’s always a good thing. Even some of the friends I normally had used as examples of like, oh, they kind of got too caught up in their day jobs to do any film-related things are now writing again. People are kind of renewing their hobbies and passions. But obviously, on the other hand, a nightmare of logistics. It would have been incredibly different to film The Last Christmas Party a year and a half later. It’s crazy to us that things have shifted this radically. Film is going to have to wait it out and learn how to social distance, how to effectively do virtual rehearsals.

More films are going to streaming and the theatrical window is closing; more people are like, “Oh, it’s so convenient to just watch things from home.” That might be how some things evolve, with, for better or for worse, video on demand and web content being even more respected now. That it’s entirely legitimate to release as VOD. Because, why not? People will still see it. People don’t have that stigma of direct to DVD anymore. Changing attitudes towards that is probably beneficial and lets a lot more content be seen. Because you can only screen so many movies in the theatre. But when you’re streaming, it’s much easier to give a lot more room for different voices and movies.

How’s YPT coping with Covid?

We’re trying to be creative and fluid and flexible and see it as an exciting opportunity to find out different ways to offer our programs. But the sense of community has not been lost, even in this.

That’s great, because I feel like you can still make art. Script writing, probably, has exponentially grown during this time period. You do need to look at the positive side of it, occasionally.

I think you’re absolutely right: the art that is going come out of this will be quite spectacular, and people will be chomping at the bit to go out there and do it.

Oh, yeah. I think there’s definitely going to be an excitement, like, “Wow, we kind of had a few months where we literally couldn’t make the films we wanted to make. So maybe we should just do that when we get out.” Don’t wait forever to pursue your passion project.

How are things progressing with Inkblack and Eating and Drinking?

Inkblack, the horror film, is about halfway done writing and we’re going to still be chugging at it for quite a while. That’s bigger budget and would require investors and even shopping it around to some smaller studios. A long-term passion thing. Eating and Drinking, it’s chugging along as well in terms of scripts being written. We want to make sure to use this time valuably and also just be like, if somebody asks us at a festival: “Well, what do you have coming up next?” we’d be able to answer them and show them these. Inkblack, wonderfully enough, we were able to film a little proof of concept short of it. Just basic fundamentals. So that way, we have something fun to work on and, “Oh, this is what it would be like working on this kind of material.” And to show people this is the kind of thing we want to make.

Maybe fortunate, in a way, that they weren’t close to production…

Very fortunate. Covid caught us at a gap. Even before, we were planning to buckle down and focus on writing things in this period. And, fortunately, we can still do that part of it. Sometimes I do virtual workshops of scenes from those scripts with actors I know, just to see how things are tracking, how things are reading. And, thankfully, all that can be done, still. We’re using the time to do that and make sure the of steam from The Last Christmas Party keeps going —spreading the word about it and also keep trying to not only push it to festivals but find a distributor, a home for it to go to where the most people can see it.

I love table reads and want to know whether they are an instrumental part now or previously in your work. I know not every film does that.

I guess I’m just riffing off the YPT model and being like, absolutely, table reads are still very important to me. They not only help everyone feel like, “We’re in this. Hello, I’m such and such,” and really kind of get the first take on what the film feels like as a whole. One of the things about working on movies is that, normally, you see scenes at most or sections of it. Unlike a play, where you get to witness the whole thing. It’s really only in read-throughs you get a feel for which scenes are automatically working great and which scenes need work. Even in the rewriting process, it was nice for us to occasionally get some actors together and do a table read. Or, for the actual film, get the actors together to do a complete table read and feel it out. Because we did slip in a few changes to the script [of The Last Christmas Party] after that table read. Because, this is the cast we have now, these are the scene they’re doing well at and these are the scenes they’re kind of still finding. Learning to balance not immediately just rewriting everything — you sort a lot of that out in rehearsal. Knowing this is an issue on our end, maybe we didn’t write them the best scene we could have. So, it’s on us to fix that.

The more I think about it, rehearsing like a YPT play made sense to me. That camaraderie of just getting into this process and, “Ok, we’re going to make this story. Seems a bit far off right now, but we’re going to do it.” And making sure everyone is on board and involved… for the actors to feel integrated into creative process and happy to be there at the end of the day.

I know Matilda would be pleased as punch and so proud. Bravo!

It’s exciting. If there’s one thing I’d like to add, if anyone is interested in pursuing the arts as a profession, from my limited experience, a lot of it is the time and work you put into it, like any other career. You could put no work into it and get little return, and that does happen. But at the same time, you might find yourself rewarded if you really put in the effort to your passion projects — the films, the shows you want to create. Really think about it, find like-minded individuals who want to do this with you. You’d be kind of surprised what you could accomplish. Because it’s not always just about the budget and the money. YPT, like clockwork, does however many shows a year. I think that mentality of keeping on chugging, keeping going — you do make some great things along the way, hopefully