726 - So you've been nominated for an Oscar

11:46John August:It's not the natural thing to write in. Yeah.

11:48Alexandre Singh:And there was a moment where we wrote something and it turned out to be like not. It's a sexual bubble on top. It did not mean what we thought it meant.

11:58John August:So you won't have heard the episode yet, but Joachim Trier came on the podcast to talk about sentimental value. And so his script was written in Norwegian, but with a lot of English in it. Then of course, there's also an English script, which is an important part of the process along the way. So for your script, you're writing this in English. And then were your French producers reading the English version or reading your French version or both? How did that work?

12:16Natalie Musteata:Oh, that's a good question. You were translating it with every draft. So people complain sometimes about making documents. Well, imagine that you had to make all your pictures, all your treatments, and then each time update them in each language.

12:29Alexandre Singh:At a certain point, we stopped writing in English and we were just writing in French.

12:33Natalie Musteata:Once we locked pages, we were in French and we just concentrated on that script. And then, as Natalie says, we were rewriting during rehearsal. We would rewrite on sets. We would rewrite the voiceover.

12:45Alexandre Singh:Yeah, and some of this you can see on our Instagram page. We did a video where we compared one of our main actresses' audition with the actual film. And you can see the dialogue has changed. we're not tied to the words. It's the sentiment that counts.

13:01Natalie Musteata:I would say, for example, probably the best thing we did in this entire process was choosing the title of our film. Because choosing the title of a film costs you zero. Nothing. And having a distinctive title, our first film was titled The Appointment. Too general. Too general. Too general.

13:18Alexandre Singh:We realized, like, yeah, almost immediately, it was, like, too late.

13:21Natalie Musteata:Yeah.

13:22Alexandre Singh:And we thought of the right title, like, very quickly. But yeah, it was already out in the world.

13:28Natalie Musteata:And when we came up with this title, there was a lot of pushback, not just from our producers who thought, oh, it sounds good in English, but it's ugly in French.

13:35Alexandre Singh:And then our American friends were like, it sounds great in French, but it's really ugly in English.

13:40John August:Yeah, but it's just distinctive. Because I remember that when I crossed my email inbox, like, oh, I recognize it's stuck in my head.

13:48Alexandre Singh:Yeah, it's also just like for us, tonally appropriate. It describes like a romantic act, but in a very clinical, like, you know, absurdist way. And that is the tone of the film. It is at once romantic and absurd. And so for us, it just made so much sense. And I think in general, like my biggest piece of advice for anyone making anything is like, do not dull the edges. Like just like, yeah, just and also make those bold decisions. Like it's important to really stick to your gut and do the thing that you want to make and not like constantly, I don't know, pander to like everyone's opinion.

14:26Natalie Musteata:You can't make everybody happy. And in this day and age, you need to make a subsection of your audience just effing love your film. And some people are not going to like it. And that's how things are. All right.

14:38John August:So the short exists. It's wonderful. Congratulations on it. But I really want to focus on you have a short. What do you do with a short? And so you say you're going into this, you know, you have these French producers, you have a way to make this thing, but you're going to have this short film. When did you know what the plan was, what festivals to go to, how to launch this into the world?

14:57Natalie Musteata:Well, this is the paradoxical thing I wanted to say is that with our first short, we had perhaps the naive ambition that this would be our ticket to the professional world. It came out in March 2020 on the festival circuit. We met zero people. It did nothing for our careers whatsoever. but in some ways we kind of had a, what's the expression, the Irish expression, a Lonergan? A Mulligan, yeah. A Mulligan. A Kenneth Lonergan.

15:20John August:A Kenneth Lonergan committed a Mulligan, yeah.

15:23Natalie Musteata:We made this film with no ulterior motive whatsoever, and I think paradoxically that is its strength. It's a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It switches perspectives between not just two characters, but actually briefly three characters, something that's not even advisable to do in a feature film. So in that sense, there was no plan whatsoever. We just poured our sincere artistic and creative ideas into the film. And then after having made it, thought, oh, bleep, what are we going to do? Because no sales agent would take it. There were very few festivals that we could apply to.

15:57Alexandre Singh:Especially in Europe. I mean, it's a European film, but every single, the duration limits for shorts on the festival circuit are determined by the awards. So in the US, it's 40 minutes because that is what the Academy Awards deems a short film. And in Europe, it's 30 minutes because that's what the European Awards deems a short film. All right. So as a 36-minute film, we were like not eligible for 90 % of film festivals. And we didn't even know shirts distributors were a thing.

16:25John August:So tell me, to which degree are they, I think? Because I don't have a good sense of what the distribution mechanism really is for. Like I know The New Yorker because The New Yorker has good ones, but tell me what you found.

16:34Natalie Musteata:There is a wonderful, rich world of short film making that is centered around mostly more international festivals. The number one festival for international short films is called Clermont-Ferrand. It is happening right now in Clermont-Ferrand in France, and it's described as the can of short films.

16:50Alexandre Singh:Honestly, like we had heard its reputation, like we had heard of it and we knew its reputation. But until you experience it, you can imagine like the quality and the care that is put into this film festival. For instance, it's the only film festival in the world where between shorts, they bring up the lights. It's like a palate cleanser. Oh, wow. And they sort of tell you like, you know, this is a moment of respite and then...

17:14Natalie Musteata:They change the Dolby level for each film. It's very, very carefully thought out.

17:19Alexandre Singh:And the cinemas are enormous. They're between... The smallest is 300 seats and the largest is 1 ,500. So you're playing every day for 10 days in like amphitheaters and every screening is sold out. We played on a Monday at 9 a.m. once. And I was like, Alex, prepare yourself. Like the weekend screenings were full, but who is going to come to this 700-person cinema at 9 a.m. on a Monday? It was full.

17:45Natalie Musteata:And so this is the sort of Sundance and Cannes of short films. And there are short film distributors there who distribute the films for French and German television channels. They are trying to sell on all different kinds of platforms.

17:59Alexandre Singh:Yeah, including Criterion, Mubi, Netflix. You know, they're pitching these things to everyone. But it is primarily a European market, I would say.

18:08Natalie Musteata:Though it is rare for a short film to get enormous visibility. And the Oscar shortlist and Oscar nomination is a type of visibility that is incomparable to the amount of eyeballs at these kind of events.

18:20John August:So was Clement your first festival you debuted in?

18:23Alexandre Singh:No. So we debuted at the Telluride Film Festival in August 2024. so which was you know again something that had been recommended to us but you know it kind of felt like a pipe dream because they only take five to seven shorts seven shorts and they're one of the few film festivals that will take a short up to 60 minutes so in that sense we're

18:46Natalie Musteata:like well we have to try but if any of your listeners are wondering did we have an in is there yes there are ways to get into these festivals but that is very much the exception We applied on the website. We sent in our little fee, as we did for all of the festivals. And we got in blind.

19:02Alexandre Singh:Yeah, and we really, really didn't expect to get in. So much so that we went on vacation not having finished the film. Because we were so sure that it was an impossibility. And day one of our vacation, we find out that we're in and the festival's in four weeks. And we had to cancel our vacation, fly back to New York, finish the film in a rush with our sound designer. Because we had just started the sound design.

19:25Natalie Musteata:And then at the second festival we showed out here in Los Angeles, AFI Fest, we won the Grand Jury Prize, which meant that we qualified for the Oscar long list. So we knew almost a year in advance that this was a possibility and we had a discussion about it and we felt...

19:39Alexandre Singh:I mean, we knew it was a possibility and we kind of prepared over the last year for this journey were it to happen. That being said, like, you know, it all felt really, I don't know, like a magical idea, not something that was a reality. And no matter how many people told us, like, your film is very good, it could get shortlisted, it could get nominated, it didn't feel like a reality until it happened.

20:07John August:So Telluride, Los Angeles, and so then you know you're on the long list. And then I imagine it becomes easier to get into other festivals because they know what you are.

20:14Natalie Musteata:You would hope so. You would hope so. Actually, no. Ironically, the festivals that you think you're going to get into, you don't. And it's very hard to predict.

20:22Alexandre Singh:Yeah, but I would say that like our first three festivals were so strong. And at Clermont-Ferrand, we won the Audience Prize and the Canal Puce Prize, which meant that we had distribution in France and Switzerland and in French territories. So it was already for me like such a Cinderella dream-like situation.

20:41Natalie Musteata:And that was the beginning of, to get back to a very original question, that was when those conversations that we had even stopped thinking about started to happen. We were approached by international producers asking, would you be interested in making this into a feature film? And those conversations started happening quicker and quicker. More people approached us. We participated in the Square Peg event in October before even making shortlist. And something that we had been listening to for many years on the show about managers and generals and agents that we had always thought, oh, we're just thinking about the craft stuff.

21:13Natalie Musteata:That doesn't really apply to us. We entered into that world and started having meetings in Europe, in the UK, and also in Los Angeles and New York with production companies that represent actors, financiers, now also some with some of the studios. And learning as we were going along what those meetings were, I think it was a few meetings in before we realized, oh, this is a general meeting. Yeah. Yeah.

21:36Alexandre Singh:But I mean, it was also for us, because we didn't make this short with any intention of making it into a feature, we did a script writer's lab in France that's a little bit like the Sundance of France called Group West. And there we gave ourselves a few weeks or a couple of months to really discover, like, is there a feature in this short? And what would it mean to do that? And what form does it take? And we sort of gave ourselves the freedom to play again. and it was in that process that we sort of found like the emotional through line of what the feature would be.

22:09Natalie Musteata:And we also started to develop some of the other ideas that we've been thinking about, often ideas that had been generated in the last 18 months that were similar to the short and similar to the feature, ideas that on their surface are absolutely ridiculous, but that we treat quite seriously, because for the characters in these worlds, this is very serious for them. And we started to, I think, get a sense of what our quote-unquote voice is, what it is that we bring to the table and feeling quite confident about the kind of films that we want to write, the kind of films that we want to make. And to welcome back to a previous recent episode, I think the short at 36 minutes, when we go into meetings, people say to us, we feel confident that you guys can pull off a feature film.

22:56Natalie Musteata:That's not always the case with a short, and that is not something we had strategically decided to do. We had done it very sincerely, rather naively. But the end product was that that's how these meetings have been going.

23:08John August:So let's talk about past success stories, like people who've transitioned from like, oh, you got a lot of attention, and then like that short film got them, you know, started on a career. And then we can talk about sort of like, sometimes it doesn't work. And the decisions that you guys are making that everyone has to make about how to prioritize what to do next. and sort of where to put your efforts and energy. Taika Waititi. So Two Cars, One Night, nominated for Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, 2005. So 20 years ago, Taika Waititi got started, went from that to Eagle vs. Shark and lots of other things.

23:41John August:Andrea Arnold with Wasp, also 2005. Martin McDonough, the short film Six Shooter in 2006. Shane Acker has his animated short, Nine, which became a feature film, Nine. Damien Chazelle had Whiplash, the short version of it, which was a proof of concept, which became The Foil. So it's kind of a short film, but kind of got attention. Jim Cummings with Thunder Road from Sundance, the Grand Jury Prize. David Sandberg, Lights Out, which started as a short. I always send people to Lights Out because it is just such a great, small, little short concept. And they were able to make the feature version of that.

24:16John August:So those are all great success stories. What's tougher to find, it's ungoogleable, is sort of like the silent evidence of like the people who had like really great short films that got attention and they got the Academy Award. And then like, you can look up and say like, well, what have they been doing since then? But unless you sort of call them up and ask like what went wrong or what happened?

24:37Alexandre Singh:Yeah.

24:38John August:And it's because they were all at this moment that you're at right now, which is like they have the heat, they have the attention and what do they do next? And so a little spoiler, so you are thinking about a feature version of this short as one of the things.

24:52Alexandre Singh:We are. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that we have the advantage of being slightly older and having had like, yeah, careers in a different field and coming to the film industry sort of like with our first short, it was quite naively and now less naively. And so I think that that's an advantage for us. At the same time, I think one of the reasons that people are very interested in the short, but also in other projects that we're pitching is because they're in this moment when it's very difficult to get people into cinemas. The sort of high concept or, you know, more absurdist leaning films are the ones that are working.

25:30Alexandre Singh:And that is what comes naturally to us. So a lot of our ideas are...

25:34John August:The A24 neon things, which are just a little bit bigger swings.

25:37Alexandre Singh:Also, like, one of the reasons that we did this, you know, shift in our careers was because what we love about cinema is the relationship to the public and to the audience, which is very different than it is in the visual arts. You really like you make an artwork and you hope that people will have a response to it. But really, like there's no relationship between, you know, a painting and an audience in the way that there is in a movie theater.

26:03John August:Your audience is also, you have very different audiences. You have like the random museum gore, but you also have the curation aspect of that and sort of who are the tastemakers, decision makers. That's all a very different thing.

26:14Alexandre Singh:Yes. And the tastemakers in the visual art world are like the key to everything. Yeah. Whereas in the film world, the audience is everything. And when you're making a film, you're sort of entering a contract with the public. And you're saying that over this period of time, whether it's 36 minutes or two hours or three and a half hours, like, I will take you on a journey and it will be worth your time and the money that you spend to come here.

26:38Natalie Musteata:We will challenge you. We will push you away. We will bring you in. We'll make you laugh. We'll make you cry.

26:44Alexandre Singh:We came to it with an incredible amount of generosity towards the audience. It's like we're making a weird film, but we've made it with a lot of heart. And I think that that like comes through. So I think there was those things that have sort of made the film very attractive to people. And the fact that, you know, we do want to make things that are, you know, you know, Kim Trier is a perfect example. Recently, he said like tenderness is the new punk and we could not agree more. Like for us, a film cannot just be high concept. It needs to have that emotional heart. And so it's those two things in concert with one another that we try to achieve with the short and that we hope every single feature that hopefully we make in the future will have as well.

27:26John August:So I want to talk about sort of the feature version of the short, which there's lots of challenges to do that because the engines are going to be different for that kind of situation. You could approach this as like Damien Chazelle did with Whiplash. It's like, I have a vision for a feature film and here's the short that I'm going to make that sort of is a proof of concept that lets me expand into that. And I see so many people who try to do short films that are just shorter versions of their feature film. And they are almost always terrible because they don't have the engine for a successful short film.

27:52John August:They don't have the setup, development, payoff, the joke kind of structure that you definitely need for a short film to work. In your case, I can't imagine you actually would have written the feature version of this first. And so it was just because the short film exists and you actually know the world and you can think about where does it want to go, that it makes sense to try to do a feature version of it knowing that it's going to be different and it's not the same thing as it's going to work in the feature version.

28:16Natalie Musteata:In some ways, we're adapting a short film that we have seen and loved and that really spoke to us. And we have ideas about how we would expand that world and what we believe to be the emotional throughline of the story, the vertebra that we would hang the story on and what the larger engine would be.

28:34John August:So that's proof of concept. There's also, I would say, a proof of execution. And so you talk, Alessandro, about, like, you realize you have a voice and you have taste and basically there's a, you have a way of sort of presenting the world. You're saying that, like, you know, tenderness is the new punk. That vision could be applied to a different movie. So as you're having conversations with people or pitching other things that you want to do, if it fits in the same kind of space that they're seeing from this first film, that's really helpful. But if you were to show up with this short film and say, I really want to do an animated story about gnomes.

29:08John August:I was like, I'm not so sure. I want to do a dark and grungy thing that is completely different than this. Everyone's like, that's not helpful for me. I can't help you there.

29:18Alexandre Singh:Yeah, I think that would be really tricky.

29:20Natalie Musteata:I think one of our strengths is, and this comes from maybe a visual background, is that we have a lot of ideas all the time. And out of those ideas, many of those ideas are not necessarily in our lane, in our wheelhouse. Sure, we could tell a Sundance coming-of-age story. We have ideas for those kind of stories. But we have enough stories that very much echo the qualities that people have been attracted to in the short. So in these meetings and conversations, I think it's been a very natural fit because the ideas that we're pitching really resonates with what they've seen us execute with the short film.

29:55Alexandre Singh:I think it's also like, I mean, before I was talking about cinema going and how that there's sort of been a decline and at least studios feel like we need more films like this. It's also the times that we're living in. Like, we're living in a moment where the ridiculous and the horrific are side by side, like almost never before or at least in a while now. And so I think that there is something about that, you know, there's a tonal line that we're sort of constantly.

30:22Natalie Musteata:And there's an urgency that we feel as storytellers and that I think the people we're meeting with are feeling. Even our film is not a necessarily political film in a didactic sense. It's not a PSA at the end where there's a little chyron that says, gives you facts, that in France, many people are put into boxes because they have that.

30:45John August:But it's absurdist in the way Terry Gilliam films are absurdist. It's a sense of like, this is a crazy world, but you can see the clear parallels.

30:53Natalie Musteata:And as crazy as Brazil is, there are aspects of Brazil that chill us and that have resonances with today. I think often of that scene where he visits Michael Palin who is a torturer and Michael Palin comes out covered in blood and they have a conversation about their children and that is actually a feeling that inspires in part our film that kind of dissonance between the everyday comfort of the society that we're existing in right now where I'm drinking some tea, having a wonderful conversation with John in this beautiful location in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, we've just been experiencing what's been happening in Minneapolis, in Maine, what is happening in Iran right now.

31:33Natalie Musteata:All these things are happening at the same time. And how do we as human beings navigate that and find meaning in our lives in these very dissonant moments?

31:42John August:You said like two or three months before the nominations is really when you've actually felt like a change happened and it was actually very meaningful. When did you recognize that something had shifted? Was it the amount of incoming calls and emails? And you started to have meetings with reps and figuring out like where you wanted to go next. Talk to us about that time and what decisions you had to make?

32:02Natalie Musteata:Well, I would say I had an image that came into my mind around this moment that somewhere on the planet, there was a switch and that someone flipped this switch. And suddenly, as in a sort of a 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon, where we are running after the industry, suddenly we exit frame, we're running back the other way and they're running after us. how that happened, what that was, but we felt that suddenly there was a switch that flipped.

32:31Alexandre Singh:Yeah, in 24 hours, we met with all the agencies. And not because we had planned it that way, it just happened to be that there was a confluence of events. And we were also just out there in the world in a way that we normally aren't, because as people that come from the arts, we are a little bit more interior-facing. And so we're used to being in our little cubby writing. one in front of the other. And suddenly, like, we were really out in the world showing the film in a very public way. And so all of that attention, I think our trailer had just come out on deadline too. And suddenly there was like a flood of emails in our inbox.

33:09Alexandre Singh:Like, we would like to see the full short. And then meetings started to happen and everything was sort of like one after another. And there was a pressure to make a decision like right away, which was very stressful. But at the same time, now that we have representation, it's opened so many doors. And we really were skeptical. Like, is this a useful thing? There were some people that were advising us, like, don't tie yourself down. It's great to be an independent agent. As two people that do not come from the film industry, like, this has been incredibly helpful for us.

33:43Natalie Musteata:We've had the experience coming from visual art of being the little engine pushing all those carriages up the hill.

33:50John August:Yeah.

33:51Natalie Musteata:raising the money, producing it ourselves, building the sets ourselves.

33:56Alexandre Singh:Alex taught himself VFX for this film because we didn't have the budget.

34:01Natalie Musteata:I did a pre-visualization of the whole film in Blender, so a 3D animation of the film. We're used to doing everything, and I think it's good to keep having that energy, but all that representation is very additive. Like, suddenly you are accelerating. It's like in Mario Kart when you go over the lines and suddenly you start to go faster. It increases momentum.

34:21Alexandre Singh:There was just so many things that happened all at the same time.

34:24Natalie Musteata:A lot of luck. I think luck is something that we don't appreciate. So many people are lucky the first time. They begin life like a game of Monopoly, and they roll double six. And then they roll double six again, and they roll double six again. And suddenly they're sitting in a creative field, or they invested in cryptocurrency, or they are the richest man in the world. and they don't realize that so much of that was luck. We are just as creative and hardworking as so many of our friends and we just happen to be in the right position at the right time. That said, we've had full careers in the visual arts.

35:01Natalie Musteata:So this hasn't happened one week coming out of film school at age 21, but still getting the cast that we got to say yes, shooting the film and the building not burning down or no one having a heart attack or all the things that go wrong on a show.

35:15John August:It's not just all the things that went right. It's all the things that could have gone wrong, which somehow you have learned.

35:19Natalie Musteata:Yes, and also the same is true for the life of the film. You get into that festival, it just happens to, for example, at Tayloride, those shorts are selected by Barry Jenkins, who chose our short because he has an affinity for French black and white cinema. Yeah. And then has gone on to support the film. So many of these encounters and things that have happened professionally have been a mixture of luck and our hard work. And we are very...

35:43Alexandre Singh:I mean, we find ourselves here today. because of a chance encounter.

35:47John August:And I want to go back because, Drew, can you take a look and figure out when did we first get contacted about this short? Good question. Because I know we got...

35:54Alexandre Singh:Oh, I'm sure our publicist...

35:55John August:Was your publicist. Because your publicist has been dogged, which is great. It totally makes sense. But I was thinking like, you know, there is, it's both, you know, a fire burns, but also people were like, were scraping sparks there a lot.

36:08Natalie Musteata:Yes, very much so. And the publicist was dogged because we said a year ago, oh, wouldn't it be amazing if we could go on script notes. It will be a dream come true.

36:18Alexandre Singh:I mean, really, this is where our cinema education begins.

36:21Natalie Musteata:All right, great.

36:22Alexandre Singh:So for us, this is a dream come true in many ways.

36:25Natalie Musteata:A similar thing happened with Charlie XCX, who wrote a review of our film on Letterboxd. Oh, that's great. Around a year ago, her Letterboxd account was made public. And I was watching TikToks where she was talking about a film. I think we recently talked about her sub stack on her. And I was thinking, she is really incredible. She has incredible taste. She's very smart. I think she would really like our film. And so we did what anyone would do. We asked, does anybody know her neighbors, gardeners, dog walkers? And we went in so many directions. Nothing happened for an entire year. And then eventually our manager said, let me just reach out to her.

37:02Natalie Musteata:I think her agent.

37:03Alexandre Singh:No, it was still like a one person led to another person led to another person.

37:08Natalie Musteata:And so I'm at home flicking through Letterboxd and I follow Charlie. She's one of my quote-unquote friends on Letterboxd. And suddenly she posts about a film and it's our film. And I think I jumped off the couch. I was so excited.

37:20John August:And so when did you find it, the first email? December 22nd, 2025. Okay, so that's pretty recently. That's pretty recently. But my manager separately had reached out. And so that's another connection. So clearly he had had, he probably had a meeting with you or somebody, his company had meetings with you about stuff. Also sent it to me. And then of course, Matt Byrne, who was my former assistant, had met you randomly at a party and sort of made these connections. And we talk on the show so often about like, do you need to live in Los Angeles? Do you need to live in New York? And no, you don't.

37:50John August:But the fact that you were in New York at the same time there and at a party, just being around people who are doing the thing you can do leads to the chance encounters. And so if you were just in a house in Maine, it would be less likely for that to have happened.

38:03Alexandre Singh:For sure. I mean, it's incredibly helpful being in New York or LA. I mean, we've been here quite a bit as a result of all of this. That being said, like, yeah, I think going on the festival journey was also really valuable. So, like, I think that that was like the first step, really. It's just making friends in the industry. It's not an either or. And like, not people above you, but like that are trying to do the exact same thing, that are doing the exact same thing. And really just, yeah, connecting on a creative level.

38:34Natalie Musteata:We've met filmmakers who are the equivalent of someone who lives in the woods in Maine, who then goes on the festival circuit and meets lots of people and then returns home to recharge and doesn't have to pay New York City rent.

38:45John August:There are helpful things about living in the hub of all this stuff. So Drew, you guys have followed the podcast, so you know that Drew went off and made a short film that he's now submitting to festivals. And he has learned a bunch of stuff. So I thought we might learn from what he's learned and sort of get your feedback on sort of how the experiences overlap. It sounds like they already figured it out before. I had to go through a process to figure it out, but I wrote a bunch of stuff as I was going. I'm like, oh, this is... And tell me if I'm wrong, too, on any of this. First one was, part of why the comedy isn't working is because I'm shooting this like a drama.

39:16John August:There's a difference, and it's not just letting things live in the wide.

39:20Alexandre Singh:Interesting.

39:20John August:Do you consider your short a comedy or a drama? It's absurdist, but...

39:25Alexandre Singh:It's absurdist. I would say that we categorize it as an absurdist drama, which means that it has... I just call it absurdist. It has elements of comedy in it.

39:37Natalie Musteata:Without sounding too highfalutin and egotistical, Shakespeare's work mixes pathos and bathos, I think, of the gravedigger scene in Hamlet. Joachim Trier's work within the same scene is mixing comedy and serious trauma together. As to the question as to whether comedy works more in the wide, that is... Well, it does. But like,

40:02John August:there's some ineffable thing that in previous shorts I'd done, it was much funnier. Yeah. That tended to be the cheaper stuff that I did. And then doing this and it looks beautiful and we have all these beautiful lenses and like it feels so heavy and I'm like trying to figure out if that's framing or if that's light or what it is, but I'm trying to get to sort of the heart of that.

40:23Natalie Musteata:It's hard to say because sometimes comedy really comes from editing and pacing. Yes. A joke is about delivery and that involves cutting and coverage in some ways. Sometimes comedy comes from the awkward and the uncomfortable. I think, for example, of Ruben Osland's films where everything is happening on a wide and this shot is going on for a really long time and I feel really uncomfortable. And the kind of Larry David idea of comedy, the uncomfortable idea of comedy. And so I think it's difficult to say without having seen the film which direction something works or doesn't work in.

40:58John August:Let's talk about during production, you had an idea about takes. Oh, yeah. So I wrote more takes is actually better. Try letting actors do three or four takes on their own before you start redirecting.

41:08Alexandre Singh:I mean, I think in an ideal scenario, you have more takes. In our experience, we just never get past like take three because we always have to move on.

41:17Natalie Musteata:I have an idea that seven is the perfect amount of takes. The reason being that it takes two or three takes for everyone to just get into the flow of things, get warmed up, as it were.

41:26John August:For your GP to stop fiddling with things.

41:27Natalie Musteata:Yeah, by four, five, and six, usually you're going to hit your best, best takes. And then seven is your coverage or just in case or just so we all feel like we've covered it.

41:37John August:Do a weird one.

41:38Natalie Musteata:If you're a take nine, 10, 11, or 12, it's because something isn't working and that's no shade on anybody. But that's because either something technically or we haven't found it yet.

41:49Alexandre Singh:That being said, I mean, Alex and I, we always do a complete pre-visualization of the film, especially because there are two of us. And because we have very little onset experience, we need to have a plan going in, you know, to the shoot. Like we cannot show up and just be like, let's find it. That doesn't mean we don't deviate. We do deviate from time to time. But we're always coming in like knowing, okay, this, we do have a plan that works. And there are parts of our film that are a one-to-one, you know, replica. So I do think, like, I think that preparation is the most valuable thing for us.

42:27John August:I want to talk about the pre-visualization for a second, too, because the next thing is film a Popsicle stick version instead of what I did is I did a storyboard. And that didn't catch little things of like how long it takes for this person to walk from here to here. And so I really should have done. And it sounds like, Alex, you used Blender and that was so smart.

42:47Natalie Musteata:I've had the experience on our first short of doing storyboards drawn by hand in Photoshop, but it's real drawing. And then being very reticent to change them because it took me a long time to draw them. Whereas in this pre-visualization, you are able to change shots very quickly, change the blocking very quickly.

43:06Alexandre Singh:Also, it meant that we could edit them together. So, like, Alex would create, first we did, like, we scanned all our environments using an app called Polycam. and then we created this 3D model. And then Alex would sort of, he would create these little marionettes and he would put the camera on like 30 different places. I would look at him and be like, this is far too many options. Yes, absolutely. You know, because obviously we're not going to have 30 setups for each of these scenes. And sometimes even within those 30 setups, I'd be like, this is, none of these are right. But we would go in and then we would find like, what is the most economical and also the best way to tell this particular scene.

43:48Natalie Musteata:It's one of the things about location scouting that we found quite difficult is that you'll, on one day and one morning, go visit five locations. Yes. You have 20 minutes. And so imagine we're shooting in here. And my immediate thought is, oh, can we get a great wide if we were up there in that corner? Oh, and can I have to go get a ladder? And there I am with the camera, not really quite comfortable. Whereas we can come in, we can scan it, not knowing whether we're actually going to shoot in it. And then as we're cleaning up the model, I'll be underneath the table because there was like strange little jagged edges.

44:17Natalie Musteata:And suddenly I see, oh, there's a shot where I see just John's foot tapping. Oh, I would never have thought to do this, but this could be an interesting way to begin the scene. And so there was a lot of the inspiration process happened in the pre-visualization in the same way that as you're writing, you have those moments in the shower where inspiration arrives, like a little elf suddenly appears on your shoulder. And that happens over the weeks, months, days, years of the writing process. And then also in the pre-production process, you're open to those moments of inspiration, just like as when you're on set, you have your storyboard.

44:51Natalie Musteata:And suddenly the camera, we had a scene where our character Angine is dreaming about the girl she loves, Malette. And she imagines herself wearing the iconic geometric black and white dress. And as she is walking towards the changing booth, as we're shooting it on the dolly, the camera suddenly started shifting down, booming by accident, like a mistake. and everybody suddenly stopped and said, that's the shot, this mistake. So that inspiration happened by accident. So it's about being open to all those moments and maybe the drawn storyboards can, unless you're Pixar and you've had 10 years to storyboard the shits out of this thing.

45:31John August:But even Pixar, they animate those things right away. Your last point I want to focus on is to this. It's hard not to focus. It's hard not to focus on what's not happening in a take. But I need to figure out how to see what is happening. Yeah. And so here's what I take from that is that if I'm looking at the monitor, my eyes draw into everything that's wrong. And so I'm trying to fix everything that's wrong. But it's hard for me to say, oh, that's actually really good because you get distracted by all of the errors. And it's so hard to focus in on what's right.

45:59Alexandre Singh:I think the only thing that matters personally is the actor. Everyone that is watching the film is watching it for the first time most of the time. I mean, hopefully your film is so good that people will watch it a second and third and fourth time. But even when you're watching a second time, people just have a way of zeroing in on a person's face because that is where all of the emotion, that is what they're reading into.

46:22Natalie Musteata:We have a hundred million years of evolution, which involves looking at people with two eyes and a nose and trying to figure out, does this person want to eat me or make love to me? And are they being sincere about it? And so performance is what we are dialed into. Everything else can fall away. There's a scene in the Coen Brothers film, Barton Fink, where the studio boss, who's been asking him to make this boxing movie and he doesn't know how to write it, hauls him back in. And in the previous scenes, he'd been so magnanimous and so generous and so like, don't worry about it. You're a genius.

46:55Natalie Musteata:You're a New York author. I'm going to support you. He absolutely berates him and destroys him. And during that scene, I think he has these lapels because it's during the Second World War. His lapels are moving around. Nobody's business. It doesn't matter. The performance is all that matters. I think Walter Murch said the same thing.

47:11Alexandre Singh:Yeah, so it's always the thing that I'm zeroing in on. It's just like, what is happening on the actor's face? Is it communicating what this scene is about? Because, yeah, all the other stuff is noise.

47:23Natalie Musteata:There's a thing that happens in filmmaking that I've rarely heard people talk about publicly, but I think is the most magical and beautiful part of filmmaking. We like to stand very close to the camera lens with those tiny little monitors. so whether we are really receptive to the character and the actor, whatever that thing is, that hybrid of the two, what they're feeling at that moment. And you're watching the film on that little monitor and suddenly you know that we have just shifted into the actual film. You just know that this is going to be projected for history.

47:57Alexandre Singh:Hopefully.

47:59Natalie Musteata:For those 10 seconds and then it sort of like drifts away and that is one of the most almost like spiritual moments of filming that is so beautiful.

48:07John August:Yeah, Drew, I think I would say is that like, yes, you're noticing all the things that aren't working, but like Alexander was saying, it's like there's moments where like, you get that little vibe like, oh, that's it, that's it. And so every day you're basically chasing that. And so there's times where I was like, I didn't have that the whole time through, but I have the pieces to get me to that. And then you have to make the choice, like, I guess I'm going to have to stitch that together in editing. I think one thing I was fighting, so you get in the edit and then you watch a take that when you watch it, you're like, the actor's not doing the right thing.

48:37John August:Yeah. And then you see like, oh, they're doing something else that's actually, there's value to that. Of course. And like, oh shit, I missed this gem that they were bringing and maybe push them away from something that could have been interesting. Because you had a vision in your head. Because I was like, yeah, the character's running in this direction and they were like, actually, if we go this path, it's interesting.

48:54Natalie Musteata:Parathetically, having had not that much experience making films yet, when you're on set and you're doing a scene, it's like play. It's creative. And even though the clock is ticking and your first AD is hovering there, whispering in your ear, you have to pretend like, to use a cruder analogy, like making love, that you have all the time in the world and that you are completely relaxed and that you are here to play and you are here to play with one another and that your actors are creative collaborators and sparring partners and they're offering ideas and you're offering ideas back. And I mean, there are probably filmmakers who have a global totalitarian vision of what the film is.

49:30Natalie Musteata:and maybe like Hitchcock, they are manipulating their marionettes. But I think you, Kim Trier and all other great filmmakers have probably said it's about this exchange and you're playing tennis with them.

49:43John August:We have two listener questions that are surprisingly on topic here. So let's start with this first one who's an Oscar nominated filmmaker. Unrepped writes, as a seasoned documentary filmmaker who earned an Oscar nomination in the mid 2010s, I'm struggling to move forward in the industry. I never secured representation after the nod because I was working comfortably in academia and assumed the nomination would keep doors open. Years later, after leaving academia, I found myself an Oscar-nominated filmmaker with a strong but limited body of work, a piece of evergreen IP, no representation, and no clear path into the current marketplace.

50:18John August:Is there any viable route for someone like me to secure representation in a business that now expects new heat, recent sales, or major attachments before anyone will even take a meeting, even though those require representation to achieve in the first place, I'm in a catch-22. Yeah, so here's a person who was in your place and didn't capitalize on the moment and that things passed by. I think they need to do something new. Yeah, I think so too. You can't rekindle off that older thing.

50:45Alexandre Singh:I think you either have to create something new, like another short, unfortunately, that catches fire, or you have to write a feature that is undeniably great. I think that great scripts are hard to come by. And I think that people are always searching for that next film that's going to bring bodies into the theater.

51:08Natalie Musteata:I do have a theory about sort of this topic, which is that the greatest films are made by 19-year-olds who don't know what they're doing and are just full of gusto and confidence. and 45, 55, 65-year-olds, I mean, I think of Milton writing Paradise Lost in his 80s when he was blind, who just at a certain point give up on trying to play the game. They've had enough of trying to write vampire stories because that's fashionable. They've given up on trying to make a new Yellowstone and they just write the thing that they really care about paradoxically that they don't think will work in the marketplace whatsoever.

51:43Natalie Musteata:Those are the kind of ideas that actually really grab people's attention. And it's hard to say to someone to do that, but just like really dig in.

51:50Alexandre Singh:I do think it's really important not to think about what the market wants. Yes, exactly. And to make something that feels very, very true to yourself. Yeah.

51:59John August:So I would say that it feels like the doors are closed, but I think with some new thing, you have an advantage of getting those doors to open up again. Because like, if you made a short, they were submitting things like, oh, you're the Oscar winning director of this other thing. Like they're going to pay more attention to you, which is good, which is helpful.

52:14Alexandre Singh:Yeah, absolutely.

52:15John August:Yeah. And people love comebacks. So that's also nice. Question from Leah. Leah writes, I'm directing a short film and have a producer going out with offers to actors. Should we be attaching the script to the offer email or waiting for the agent to respond back and then sending the script to them? I'm not sure if agent emails have like filters that put anything in the trash immediately, that has an attachment for someone they don't know, or if it's better to save time at the front end of the convo by preemptively sending the script. What did you guys do for your script as you were going out after actors?

52:46Natalie Musteata:I think we always attached it.

52:47Alexandre Singh:Yeah, we always attached it.

52:49Natalie Musteata:There's not enough time to have that back.

52:50Alexandre Singh:The script was what attracted people. And I think it's really always important. And people always ask us, like, how did you get, like, this amazing cast? And it's like, we just asked. Like, you always have to ask. You just never know.

53:02Natalie Musteata:In some ways, people don't ask them. And so they're flattered. You never know. And if they're not interested, they're not interested. And you may as well try.

53:12John August:It's a short film also. So it's like, it's not secret information. And it's like, it's not a huge ask. And so if they're curious, they'll open up the PDF and look through it. And if it's good, they'll send it along. So I don't think it's a problem. Did you guys do cover letters to your actors? We did, always.

53:27Alexandre Singh:I knew we do cover letters for the smallest thing. I'm like, would you like it?

53:32Natalie Musteata:No, we only wrote it to those actresses in that particular month. I think it's always good to articulate. We're not just going out to you because you're well-known or because you're a great actor. because something about your work and who you are as a human being, because often who they are as an artist is woven into who they are as a human being, profoundly touches us and connects with us and connects to this story. And I think sincerity is a very powerful thing.

53:59Alexandre Singh:Yeah, the reasons that you want to work with someone should be very specific. So we always take the time to articulate what that is and to write something that's personal because when you're making art, it is personal.

54:11Natalie Musteata:Can I ask a listener question? Please. because I've always wanted to write in with a listener question and this is much easier. Natalie and I have a four-year-old daughter. Oh, yeah. We have careers. I'm a visual artist. Natalie is not a historian. But those things have really been on the back burner whilst we were making this film and specifically we were making this campaign. And every week I listen into a podcast and I hear John and Craig talk about, and I know John has Highland the software app. He is making games. He's also writing young adult fiction. And he's also playing D &D on Sundays or Thursdays.

54:51Natalie Musteata:On Thursdays. And also playing some video games.

54:54John August:Rarely, but occasionally, yes.

54:55Natalie Musteata:And then he's also writing great feature film scripts. And then apparently also does a podcast, I've heard as well. Where is this magic time machine where you are using, are your days 28, 32 hours long rather than 24?

55:09John August:It did. So, Drew, maybe you can help out. I also have this question. that I'm around John more than anyone else in my life. I get a lot done for sure. If I write two hours a day, that's great. I get a lot done, but there's a lot of other stuff I want to do and I just kind of find ways to do it. And I also, I think I'm really good at recognizing the common patterns between things. And so like the software stuff isn't really that different than the filmmaking stuff I'm doing because I'm using Highland every day to write everything I'm doing. All the other stuff too. You have your to-do lists, which I think helps focus you quite a lot.

55:38John August:So I've talked about this on the podcast before, but I have my daily list. which is I print out a sheet that's folded in fourths. It's just like what I'm going to do, like things I need to do today. It's a checklist of those things. And there's some stuff that's pre-printed on there. So like my Duolingo and my other stuff that's drastically done every day, but like I fill that list and that's my plan for the day. And I get basically everything on that list done every day. And that helps a lot. And I try to make sure they are very, I'm writing like the actual achievable thing that I can do. That's sort of that next action aspect of it all.

56:10John August:But I just, I make a list and I get the things on the list done.

56:14Natalie Musteata:Right.

56:14John August:That's sort of how it gets down to it. But you have a four-year-old and also like, it's recognizing that like, you know, any plan fails against a child. It's just like, children are, they will take every bit of everything, but they're also wonderful.

56:29Alexandre Singh:Yeah.

56:30John August:All right. It's time for one cool things. My one cool thing, keeping with this whole theme, is a short film. It's a short film called Troy by Mike Donahue. It's from two years ago, I think. It's a comedy about this New York couple who become obsessed with their neighbor who was a sex worker and sort of get too involved in his life. It's really well done. It's a perfect New Yorker short film. It's exactly sort of what you want from it. The YouTube algorithm just served it to me randomly. So thank you. It's just really delightfully done. So Troy by Mike Donoghue. I'll put a link in the show notes to that.

57:01John August:Natalie, what do you have to share with us?

57:02Alexandre Singh:So I would like to share the New York Public Library's picture collection. All right. Which is where we begin all of our projects. Oftentimes, even before we know what a story will be or a script will be, we'll sort of go in. So it is a physical place in the New York Public Library on the 42nd Street, you know, Fifth Avenue.

57:23John August:The Lions Building. The Lions Building.

57:26Alexandre Singh:Yeah, the iconic building. And it's a room in which there are like...

57:29Natalie Musteata:2.8 million images that have been cut out of books, newspapers, magazines over the last, I don't know, 50, 60 years. In an age where we are experiencing AI that is regurgitating images and art back to us, making us into Studio Ghibli characters, when visual research sometimes involves just typing in a location or an idea into Google and seeing the first 10 images that come back, which are always going to be the same images. There's something about the serendipity of going into this place and digging through images that are not online, that are sometimes misclassified, that sometimes have a different image on the backside, and being inspired.

58:09Alexandre Singh:Yeah, oftentimes the story will take a turn because of something that we've seen in the picture collection. Yeah, it's just sort of a magical place for us, so we always come back to it.

58:22John August:A question, just because Alexandra just completely took over your wonderful thing. So you're married and do you set a time of like, we're going to stop being our creative selves at a certain point and just be a married couple?

58:33Alexandre Singh:No, it's impossible. Yeah, no, I think that like, you know, that's part of the fun too. Like, you know, the triumphs, we celebrate together. The disappointments, we also get to weather together. And I can't really imagine it any other way. It became like very obvious very early on that we would make a really good duo because we have the exact same taste and we love the exact same things, but we bring totally different things to the table. And so it ends up, you know, I always get sad when duos break up because once they do start to make films independently, you can actually see what they brought.

59:12Alexandre Singh:And you're like, oh, but, you know, it was the combination. Those brothers were so good together.

59:19John August:And which ones? There's been a few. That's why I picked brothers. No, not those brothers. Yeah.

59:25Alexandre Singh:So I just, I feel really grateful that we work together and there are arguments here and there. There's creative friction. There's creative friction from time to time, like in any duo. But at the same time, like, I would say like 90 % of the time we agree. And when we don't, it's the detail that no one really cares about but us. And so, I mean, like, that's part of the fun too.

59:46Natalie Musteata:Writing and directing requires so many different types of skill sets. You need to be the introverted person sitting in your bathrobe, hunched over a typewriter for months on end in a Los Angeles hotel. And you also need to be the extrovert on the can red carpet, getting your photo taken, wheeling and dealing. And whilst we can have that kind of schizophrenic quality sometimes, it's much easier if that can be reflected in your creative partnership. Obviously, the writers, the directors, the producers all bringing complementary things to the table, but always having the same idea of what film we're making.

1:00:17Alexandre Singh:Yeah, I always joke that it's easier to write together and to work together than it is to parent together. Yes. Not because, like, you know, we don't get along in that either, but just because, like, having a child is just, like, the ultimate work of art. Oh, it is. That's a hard percent. Like, it's an uncontrollable one with no end. You know, like, Alex really treated, like, our child for the first three months as, like, a pre-production. Oh, yeah.

1:00:40Natalie Musteata:I'm going to do this. I'm going to be perfect.

1:00:42Alexandre Singh:Yeah. And then, like, three months in, he's like, oh, my God, this never ends. And that doesn't— I can't bring this energy like 24-7 forever. So, you know, there's just, but, you know, it's all a pleasure and it's all part of the magical, you know, ride that is living.

1:00:58John August:Alexander, what's your wonderful thing?

1:00:59Natalie Musteata:Well, I did hesitate. For a long time, I thought, well, maybe my Remarkable Tablet, which means...

1:01:03John August:Oh, yeah, I love those. Talk to me about how you use it.

1:01:06Natalie Musteata:Well, actually, that was my, like, not actual wonderful thing. But if you allow me, the Remarkable Tablet is a e-ink display that you can write on that has a very stripped-down interface. I come from the generation of people who wrote in many notebooks with a beautiful fountain pen and then ended up carrying around seven or eight notebooks and destroying my back. I can use it for writing ideas, for school meetings, whatever it is, and it has enough satisfaction. I know Craig has complained about the glassy feel of an iPad. It's not as beautiful as a fountain pen, but it is still very satisfying.

1:01:38Natalie Musteata:And as someone who will take notes in every meeting, sometimes I won't even read those notes back, but the act of writing by hand helps make the information go into my brain. But I'm going to cheat a little bit because actually, this being Script Notes, I would like to bring to you a game.

1:01:53John August:All right, which is?

1:01:54Natalie Musteata:I don't know if you're familiar with this game. In very long car rides as a child, the only games that I think we had were sort of 20 questions. Of course. And what am I seeing out the window, I suppose? All right, yeah. There's a game that my friend, the novelist Benjamin Hale told me about, which he has deemed Stinky Pinky. but you may know under a different name. I've never heard of it. It is a game in which you put together an adjective and a noun, and the answer is something that rhymes. So, for example, the name of the game is the explanation for, if I was to say to you, smelly finger, you would think about it and you'd say, stinky pinky.

1:02:31Natalie Musteata:So, for example, I could give you a very easy one. Please. Overweight feline.

1:02:35John August:The fat cat.

1:02:36Natalie Musteata:Exactly. And part of the pleasure is deciphering it, but part of the pleasure is coming up with them. For example, one of my favorites, which is a very hard one, I'll give it to you, but with no expectation that you'll get it, is Dashing Pirate.

1:02:51John August:All right.

1:02:53Natalie Musteata:This is the hardest one I've ever come up with. It's Debonair Corsair.

1:02:58John August:Debonair Corsair, very nice.

1:02:59Natalie Musteata:A clue, this involves French. All right. False enemy.

1:03:04John August:Faux-faux.

1:03:04Natalie Musteata:Yes. All right. Isn't this a fun game? It's a fun game. And the great thing is, it's great for car rides, it's great for airports, If you're into puzzles and it can be, you know, you can play with your children and set easier ones. You can come up with devilishly difficult ones.

1:03:17John August:It's also very Craig, so he will enjoy it. I think he might enjoy it.

1:03:20Natalie Musteata:Yeah. Very nice. Stinky pinky.

1:03:22John August:That is our show for this week. Scripturances is produced by Drew Marquardt. It's edited by Matthew Cilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnoggs.com. That's also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Thank you to John Pope, our DP for this episode. We're trying this out on video. You'll find the transcripts at journalerogs.com, along with a sign-up for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Script Notes book is available wherever you buy books.

1:03:49John August:You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube to search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You'll find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. Are you guys premium subscribers? We are.

1:04:11Natalie Musteata:Yes. Yes. All right.

1:04:13John August:Because you get the bonus segment, so you're familiar with it. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record on black and white. Natalie and Alexandra, thank you so much. Congratulations. Oh, thank you so much.

1:04:26Alexandre Singh:This is such a pleasure.

1:04:39Thank you.