Graham SwonAn Interview with Graham Swon Joshua Bogatin August 2024 Interviews Issue 110 There could hardly be a less auspicious way to start a filmmaking career than as a producer on a Matías Piñeiro film, and it wasn’t long after producing Hermia and Helena (2016) that Graham Swon began to clearly emerge as a major voice on the American independent film scene. Primarily working out of New York, he has made a name for himself over the past ten years while working with cinephile-minded directors like Ricky D’Ambrose, Ted Fendt, Dan Sallitt, and Gina Telaroli. If there’s one thing that unites them it’s a strong sense of intellectualism, a sharp attention to place, and a willingness to rethink traditional cinematic forms. As a filmmaker Swon has been rethinking the conventions and possibilities of cinematic storytelling across his two features to date, The World is Full of Secrets (2018) and An Evening Song (for three voices) (2023). Set over one night at a high school girl’s slumber party where the various friends hold a scary story competition, The World is Full of Secrets conjures a unique gothic atmosphere of adolescent mystery. The scary stories themselves, delivered through two extremely long and tight close-ups of the speakers’ faces, are captivating studies in duration and the relationship between cinema, the human voice, and the expressive abilities of the close-up. His second and latest feature, An Evening Song, is an even more incantatory work. In simple terms it’s a 1930s set melodrama depicting a love-triangle between real-life writer Barbara Newhall Follett (Hannah Gross), a pulp fiction novelist, Richard (Peter Vack), and their maid, Martha (Deragh Campbell). In actuality the film is an impressionistic work focused on time, memory, and identity that’s filled with duelling voice-over tracks from all the main characters and a near constant stream of dissolves. It was also shot on a custom-built camera rig that reflected the images through a large format photography camera, onto a plate of ground glass, and then into a digital cinema camera. The result is an image that is hazy and filled with intense vignetting, looking completely out of time. I met with Swon over coffee to discuss the film the morning of its New York premiere. In addition to talking about his film, I was eager to ask him about an article on hypnagogic cinema he had published the day before. Both avid cinephiles, we almost immediately launched into a discussion of Classical Hollywood and auteurism. – J.B Graham Swon: One of the things I find so interesting about Fritz Lang, is that he worked across all budget-range of films. You have Metropolis (1927), which is basically the most expensive film ever made at that moment, and you have House by the River (1950), which is an absolute z-budget film where he has almost no resources. So you can see how he functions at the top, at the bottom, and in the middle with completely different crew sizes and amounts of editing time. I feel like you really get to understand Lang’s idiosyncrasies because of this and that’s less accessible with directors who stay more in one budget range. Joshua Bogatin: It’s much different than what’s considered the ideal trajectory for most directors. You’re supposed to try to build upwards in production scale. GS: Well, that’s the received wisdom. It’s an agent/manager maxim that you’re not supposed to make a lower-budget movie than the previous movie you made because then you’ll be pigeon-holed. This only really matters in the commercial sphere, but I do think it’s a shame because sometimes people could do more interesting things if they could bounce between budget levels. Instead they end up not making as many films because trying to make a whatever-million dollar movie is a lot harder to get off the ground than a $100,000 film. I really appreciate Hong Sang-soo’s movement down, as he becomes more famous he keeps making smaller and smaller movies. JB: He’s a crew of one person now. What was the scale of An Evening Song and how did it come together? GS: It was under $200,000. When you’re starting to put together a project it’s very rare that you know how you’re going to get money to make it. In this instance I started the script in 2019 and it began as a short script because I thought I could produce it faster, but it just got longer and more ornate. I was in the process of moving out of New York at that time. I had been there for a decade and wanted to move to the country. It didn’t really have a setting at that point, so I thought I’d set it wherever I was going to be living. A friend of mine told me to look into the grants in Iowa because they have film grants which were definitely not on my radar. So 50% of the shooting budget came from the Iowa Arts Council, which is like National Endowment for the Arts money. It’s the only film I’ve done where a considerable portion of the budget came from government funding, which is so abnormal in the US. An Evening Song JB: There’s such a fondness for the natural world in the film, you fill the images with these beautiful landscapes and a fine attention to detail. Was that there from the start of the film or did that come through your decision to set it in Iowa? GS: It certainly came from spending time there. Whenever you’re in a place and thinking about setting a film in that place, the environment, the light, the shape of things starts to become part of the story. One of the reasons that I decided to make the film out there was that I grew up mostly on the East Coast and I’ve lived most of my life in cities or suburbs. I feel like I have a foreigner’s excitement for rural environments. I find these big open fields and spaces really staggering. When I’m driving around Iowa, I always think about how it’s such a fertile environment. There’s a reason they turned it into all this farmland, the soil is really good. They have these gorgeous giant plains and it’s been really destroyed by humans in the same way that a city destroys an environment. Everything’s been monocropped and cut up and flattened. All the trees have been removed or replaced with these endless cornfields that are completely unnatural for that space. It’s beautiful, but there’s also a sense of loss to me when I look at it. It’s a gorgeous, unique ecosystem that’s been flattened and industrialised even if it hasn’t been urbanised. I felt like that also had to do with the content of the film. JB: I think that is very in line with the sense of ephemerality in the characters and world. The title, An Evening Song, implies time passing, days ending and the film centres around Barbara Newhall Follett, a poet who mysteriously disappeared. GS: Completely. The real origin point of the script was this plant Thismia Americana that had been observed just briefly for a couple of years by one graduate student outside of Chicago. She did her dissertation on it, she got her PhD, she left, and then she came back several years later and she could not find any examples of the plant anymore. It was a slightly improbable plant because all of the Thismias that do exist are in subtropical environments. If this one person hadn’t spent time observing this very small population of this plant, we wouldn’t know it had ever existed. That was really what started thinking about the script. Then these other stories about Barbara Newhall Follett and Martha, the last passenger pigeon, became guiding lights or symbols of different types of absence that I wanted to weave into this melodrama. I think this idea of the environment shifting and something no longer being able to exist because of that shift, was at the core of what I was trying to make a film about. JB: How did the melodrama enter into the script? GS: I love melodrama, especially classical ones from the silent era through the ‘50s. At some point when I was working, I had these different voices and ideas that weren’t even characters yet, so I thought I would put them in a space together and make a kind of chamber drama. It just naturally turned into a melodrama. I think that melodrama is a capital-G genre to me where there are rules and a structure that is really inherent to it. It’s not just a setting or a vibe, like science fiction or westerns where the rules aren’t really essential. With melodrama, like with horror films, the rules are very core. It helps to work with a genre like that because it gives me a structure which I can hang some pretty elusive ideas on, while still allowing it to be pretty accessible to the viewer. I thought it would be nice if the movie could feel like it was made by a high modernist writer writing a screenplay for RKO. That was the environment I wanted to create. JB: How do you balance having this generic template where you can tell something like a tidy story with the ways in which you seem to always be transcending or evading traditional storytelling? Maybe this is obvious, but for me it really felt musical, like a song, in many ways. GS: It’s a pretty organic process. I’m a very digression oriented person. I tend to digress often in conversation, my wife always says that I can speak indefinitely because I start in one place and keep digressing and wandering into a new direction. That’s just how my brain operates. I’ve always liked these harder genres and one of the things that’s useful for me as a writer is to be able to say, “this is a menage a trois chamber drama.” It gives me something solid and a bit simple to work with. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to do this really heavy, interlocking narrational structure and I felt that the plot had to retain a level of simplicity to sustain that. I was always hoping that the central dynamics would be solid and clean enough that if they got really lost, they would find their way back in the next scene. Then they could get lost again later on and it wouldn’t be just a morass of words they couldn’t understand. JB: This is like what we were saying about classical filmmaking too: the more rigid the rules are, the more freedom you have. GS: Yeah and a large majority of my favourite films come from that system. I love broad swaths of different types of cinema, but I always end up coming back to classical Hollywood. I wanted to find a way to aesthetically grapple with that era without imitating it either. You can’t really mistake my film for an old studio film, even if it has a bunch of old studio DNA shot into it. JB: I also recently read your piece on hypnagogic cinema and I found it interesting that about two thirds of your hypnagogic film canon are classical films. When I think of hypnagogic cinema, I think of more experimental films or films from the fringes of the arthouse circuit, something like Hard to Be a God (Aleksei German, 2013) or La Région Centrale (Michael Snow, 1971), for example. Films that force you to really get lost in their rhythms. I don’t think of studio films. GS: I think those films do have a hypnagogia to them, but for me the simplicity of B-movies are a key part of actually being let loose in the film. Something like Wavelength can do it, but I think, for a lot of viewers, Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967) is going to just knock you out or it’s not giving you enough to let you relax into the movie. I talk a lot in that essay about Night Tide (Curtis Harrington, 1963), which is a favourite film of mine. I think Night Tide and Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962) are these films that have experimental DNA in the way they’re made, but they still really embrace popular digestible pulp forms. That combination lets my brain unleash itself in a different way. Hard to Be a God demands a lot of you, I don’t think Night Tide demands anything. JB: You also don’t get fully lost in movies like Night Tide. It’s more like the state between sleep and consciousness. You’re not fully falling asleep, but it still consumes you in a way. Its rhythms are so elusive that you can’t fully grasp it, but you can locate yourself just enough. GS: It needs to be that type of threshold kind of experience. I didn’t include any David Lynch because, other than in Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977), I think the emotions are too big and the structure is too ornate. There has to be a quality to where you could fall asleep. You can fully relax, this can just be something on TV where your brain can merge with it a little bit. There needs to be a low-keyness to the amount of emotion. I was just trying to grapple with a feeling that certain films give me and that feels so unified across them. I’m always searching for it as a viewer and when I’m making something. An Evening Song JB: In your movie there’s also this sense of liminality that lines up nicely with what you’re talking about. All of the characters are in a state of constant transition. They’re all on the precipice of something, whether it’s Barbara who is actually disappearing, Martha who is becoming Barbara, or Richard who is changing as a writer. GS: When I was writing the screenplay I thought that I wanted to have one voice that cannot change, one voice that has to change, and one voice that doesn’t need to change but the environment shifts for them. I think there are different ways to parse it, but for me Barbara is the voice that can’t change and Martha’s the voice that has to change, that will change no matter what. For both personality reasons and socio-political reasons, Richard doesn’t have to have the same shift, but because of all the shifts around him, I think there’s still an evolution to that character. He’s the trickiest one to grab onto for me. JB: Also performance wise, I think his emotions and intentions are clearest and the most surface-level. GS: I think he’s the most physical of the characters. There’s a physicality to Richard that Peter [Vack] really brought to it. When casting and working with the actors, I really want them to inhabit and bring their own ideas and feelings about the characters into the process. Peter really brought this humorous quality to it and a different kind of physicality than the other actors have. Hannah [Gross] is so floating and elusive. They all kind of dovetailed with the characters in different ways. JB: Deragh Campbell is also very elusive. She’s physically ordinary, but it feels like it only adds to her mystery and opaqueness. GS: One of the things that I’ve always thought is so incredible about Deragh as a performer is that she’s unbelievable at thinking on screen. When I watch her in any movie, I can always feel her character thinking. That was something I really wanted to have in the film, a feeling that even though Martha is drifting around, doing simple things and having little interactions, you still feel like there’s this whole complex mechanism inside of her. There’s something about her eyes, she can do very little, but I can feel the thoughts going on inside of her. JB: She’s a very physical actress and at the same time she never actually feels like an actress, like she is going through the mechanics or techniques of performance. GS: She can flatten when she needs to, but I think she’s very physical. We talked a lot about physical things like how Martha walks, how Martha picks up an object, what’s the rhythm of her movement. She’s great at conveying stuff through relatively simple movements. I really wanted all three actors to feel like they partially existed in different worlds, but that they still had a toe or a foot in the same world. It’s like there was a slightly different universe that each of these people lives in and we’re watching the overlap of those universes, the converging point between their different realities. JB: When you were writing, how specific was the relationship between the voiceover and the various dramatic scenes? GS: All the preparation for the film was hyper classical. The final film changed from the shooting script, but only because of editorial decisions, not because of the way we shot and prepped it. It was very deliberately written out what narration goes where and how each scene flows into each other. It was also very thoroughly storyboarded. JB: You storyboarded the dissolves too? GS: Yeah. When you’re low on budget you can’t control the locations enough to fully adhere them to your vision. You can’t have an Eisenstein level of image control, but we knew that this shot is going to go over this other shot. We knew when we needed to frame to have enough empty space so that the images mingle in the way that we want. If your images are too packed and you do that much dissolving, it becomes mushy at a certain point. All that was planned and I knew I was going to edit it in that manner from its inception. An Evening Song JB: Can you talk about the camera that you used and your work with cinematographer Barton Cortright? What was the unique setup which you used for the camera and what inspired it creatively? GS: I had wanted to do this with the camera for some time. Bart and I worked together to build a rig where we were using a four by five large format photography camera combined with a digital cinema camera. The image was really being captured by the lens on the photography camera, which projected it onto a plate of ground glass and then we recorded that image on the glass with the digital camera. So all the images in the film are projections on glass. They’re images of images from the moment of capture. When I first started using large format cameras, the image on the glass was so beautiful to me. It’s not the same image as the final picture, which is crisp and sharp and high resolution. The image on the glass is sharp and it has all this detail, but there’s a diffusion and the texture that you’re getting through the glass has a watercolour-like flow to the colours as well as a really strong natural vignette. I always thought that I would love to be able to make a film that had the feeling of just looking at an object through one of these cameras. If I take one and point it at a coffee cup, the mundane coffee cup suddenly becomes this mythological, three-dimensional, painting-like object just by virtue of looking at it through the glass. It was easy to say we’re gonna shoot it like this, but the light loss and the difficulty of having multiple capture devices with multiple points of focus and failure proved challenging. We had to build out something that would be usable to actually make a feature film with. When I finished the script, I thought that this could be the film where we use this camera device. It needed to be a film where this makes sense, where it’s not just an arbitrary decision to shoot in this style, but that there was an aesthetic conceptual reason why this type of image is right for this story. We did a bunch of tests and there were a lot of complexities that came from working this way, so we considered if there was a way we could just use a lot of filtration or modified lenses. Is there a way to do it without this whole apparatus? We did tests in both directions and just kind of concluded that there were so many interesting elements that came from this, that it was the way to go. I think now you can get so much sensitivity in digital cameras that it’s possible to deal with the amount of light loss that we had while using this. The large format lens is not a high-speed cinema lens that’s going to open to like F3.5 or F4. So already we didn’t have a huge amount of light coming through the lens, and then we kept losing it at each step of the process. With the glass you lose light; when you’re going to another lens, to another sensor, you lose light. Every element that you put between the image and the final capture device makes you lose light. Luckily the sensitivity of digital cinema cameras are so good that we could grapple with that. A lot of people think we put a lot of vignette on the image, but in reality we were actually fighting against the vignette because it’s so strong. This is a little overly technical, but it’s like a 6 to 7 stop difference between the centre of the image and the corner of the image. You don’t have the kind of dynamic range you have if you’re just shooting a person with a digital camera because you’re not shooting the person, you’re shooting this projection on the glass. So if the glass is blowing out, there is no image to recover later. If the glass is black, there’s nothing to pull out of the shadows. So it was a more delicate production. JB: It also gives it a retrograde look, the images feel as they’re from another time. GS: It’s from another time, another space, another dimension. I love hand-coloured films, and there was a point in which I was wondering if we could make this whole film hand-coloured. I did some research, and I still want to do it sometime, but it would’ve been so resource intensive, even with digital technology, to really hand colour the film. I love the ethereal texture that you get, the colours always feel like they’re dissolving a little bit in the glass. At certain moments it feels like the whole image is so fragile that it might just dissolve completely. I think especially in some of the scenes of Hannah in the woods at night where it’s very dark. I love the slow gradations to total darkness that you get on the image, it feels like it might just fade away and disappear. JB: It also adds to the sense of unreality and dreaminess I felt throughout. I was never sure if what I was watching was reality or some kind of inner state. GS: I think it’s for each person to experience or interpret it in the way that they want, but for me I always have moments where I’m wondering if this is a sort of dream or a series of interlocking dreams. What is the line between what’s imagined and what’s a memory and what’s reality within the story? This has always been a little blurry for me personally, and I wanted that to be felt not only in the construction of the story, but also in the construction of the images and the sound. An Evening Song JB: I think the centrepiece of the film, that long circular dolly shot around Martha and Barbara, displays that beautifully. It superimposes the image over itself, but blown up, and it makes you lose track of what the base level of reality is, in a way. GS: I’m always interested in finding techniques or ideas that have been utilised in different ways historically, but can be put in a new context. I draw a lot from completely non-narrative experimental cinema. I’m always thinking about taking techniques you might see in something like a Nathaniel Dorsky film and putting them inside a narrative melodrama. Not in a clever way or to make a point, but just as part of the texture of the film. I was always thinking about how the film should be edited and I kept thinking, “what if this is a slightly different reality where the cross dissolve is the absolute standard shot to shot transition, and the cut is the exception you use for a specific reason.” I think cuts are often not thought about that deeply. People don’t meditate that much on why you cut. Cuts are really extreme things, I consider them more extreme than a cross dissolve. JB: In a way it goes back into the avant-garde’s obsession with early cinema where the rules were more open. It’s about reconceiving the rules and reconceptualising them, questioning why they’re rules at all. GS: Exactly, there are so many dead ends, so many things that were tried once and then abandoned, or used for a time in a certain way and then it just fell out of style. Also you obviously have all these different cinematic ideas that relate to different technologies. When your sound recording system is a certain way, you end up shooting differently. When the camera is a certain way, it’s different again. That’s something I think about a lot in movies. I have a really great affection for Italian genre films of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. One of the reasons I love these movies so much is because they possess a certain silent film DNA since they recorded them without sound. The kings of the Italian horror films are so formally different and I think the lack of sound recording shapes everything about their process. All these things feed together when you’re making something that hopefully is an interesting experience for the viewer. JB: Also budgets play such a big role. With someone like Jess Franco there just wasn’t always enough money for coverage. There are scenes that play out so long, almost like in early cinema, and the empty space becomes so unsettling. GS: I should have put more Jess Franco films on my list of hypnagogic films. Him and Doris Wishman, more figures from the real edges and margins of cinema. Franco is a really interesting example because I feel like he’s making experimental films almost by accident or out of necessity. Almost nobody does as many interesting things with a zoom as Franco does. There’s so much possibility in cinema based on so many ideas, but for a lot of people, those ideas remain inaccessible because of the form that they’re trapped in. JB: If there’s more money involved it’s also harder to make movies that are profitable, but also open to experimentation. With money you have to conform more to certain standards. GS: Yeah, those are movies that were being done with so little money that even though they were commercial objects, they didn’t have any kind of corporate oversight. There were no executives looking at what Franco was doing. They didn’t really care what he was doing. They cared about if the movie had X amount of nudity and X amount of blood and was done by X date. JB: They’re basically just buying a title on a poster. GS: So he has a kind of bizarre freedom. I think a lot of people working in that space don’t pick up on that freedom in the way he did. It’s something in his mind or his way of thinking. I don’t see many divisions between these big types of films. I think interesting things can emerge anywhere whether it’s in classical Hollywood cinema, genre cinema, experimental cinema, wherever. I just try to find the ideas that excite me between those spaces and weave them together into something. JB: To wrap up, could you also talk about how you feel your producing has affected you as a director? GS: They are different processes, but there’s a lot of connection between them because they’re both about managing and collaborating with the other people. So much of producing for me is trying to figure out how you can extend the resources you have. Not just money, but also time and energy. How you can work with the different talents and ideas of your collaborators to achieve the aesthetic goals of the writer director. I’m a very director focused producer, generally speaking. I’m always working with directors that I really admire and am interested in, who are often very different from me as a director. I learn a huge amount from all of them. One of the joys of producing is that I get to be involved in a lot more films of different shapes, aesthetics, and ideas than I would get to be if I was just making independent art films as a director. Conversely, the amount of production I do probably slows me down a little bit as a director, but I’ve produced something like 11 or 12 features and as a director I would be incredibly lucky if I could make 11 or 12 films. I definitely think my directing and producing are intertwined. I think there’s no true division between the logistics of production and the aesthetic results. I’ve also always been attracted to producer-director figures like Val Lewton, Roger Corman, or Andy Warhol. They are some of the people that I feel most aesthetically connected with. I think producers have more fluidity than directors to work on radically different types of things. It’s something that I’d like to continue to do as a producer. As a writer director I think it’s unlikely that I’m going to make a rom com, it’s not really in my blood, but to be able to make that kind of film as a producer with somebody else directing would be so fascinating to me. JB: Are you actively interested in trying to grow in budget scale? GS: I am, but I think it’s much easier to consider than to do. You have to have somebody interested in giving you money, and you have to have a product that’s going to be commercially interesting to people. It is something that’s hopefully going to happen for me in either or both producing or directing. Many of the directors I work with want to do things on a broader canvas. Working in the sub-$300,000 budget range that I pretty much have always existed in, it’s very hard to do things like eat and pay rent. It’s a very hard space to exist in, financially. So it would be great for both practical and aesthetic reasons. Also you want people to see the films and while it’s possible when you make a very small film, it’s very appealing to have more resources and a different kind of audience. So, if you know anybody who wants to make a big budget movie, let me know. But I’ll also say that I wouldn’t want to be consumed in the process and to start thinking that each thing has to be bigger or that I have to scale up. I’m into freedom and the kind of discoveries you can make when you don’t have the pressures of getting that much money back to people. If you make a film for $5 million, that means somebody gave you $5 million. That’s a different kind of pressure than $30,000. JB: I read an interview where you talked about the appeal of the micro-budget working methods of Eric Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo. You talked about how working on that small of a scale where you don’t lose money is attractive and sustainable. GS: The industry is always shifting. Hong has managed to build this film structure that’s really interesting. Rohmer obviously was able to do this too. Rohmer was also reasonably commercially successful with those films, but he didn’t get blinded into making them bigger and bigger and bigger. He kept them small. Small crews are also more pleasurable to work with because everybody is personally involved in the process. As you get a bigger and bigger crew, you start to deal with department heads rather than individual people. I think a lot of big filmmaking is very wasteful in the way that it’s structured. Looking at somebody like Sean Baker, he’s been able to make things on a bigger scale while also still keeping an intimate team of people. I think you see that in his movies, you can still find a sense of discovery. I would be interested in doing a $70 million film with a giant budget. It would be a completely different experience, but there are interesting things to be discovered throughout the budget range. JB: In a perverse way I think that sense of freedom and discovery is strongest at the biggest and smallest budgets. GS: I don’t know, it’s an interesting thing. When I produced Notes on an Appearance, Ricky Ambrose’s first film, we made that movie for basically $25,000, and then we got a little bit more for post so in the end it was a little under $30,000. Throughout the process, we were often thinking that if we just had another $10,000 or $20,000, all our problems would be solved. You’re constantly running into problems where you might need a little more money. So when we did The Cathedral several years later we had $200,000, but all of our problems were not solved. Instead we kept thinking that if only we had another $200,000, all our problems would be solved. I have a feeling that even when you have $60 or $70 million, you’re going to wish you had another $10 million. Restriction is part of the process. You’re always going to have a set of tracks that you’re on and you have to figure out how to experiment and discover things inside that shape, whatever it may be. I don’t think that ever goes away.
