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Your new movie Cram
- in a few words, what is it about?
Thanks for taking the time to chat, Mike! I’m grateful for the
opportunity. Cram is about a not-so-studious college student named
Marc (John DiMino) who’s struggling to finish a final paper the
night before it’s due. When he dozes off in the library, he
wakes to discover his paper is gone — a nightmare I think many
of us have had in some shade. But for Marc, that’s just the
beginning of the story, and what will become a much darker, more
existential academic nightmare.
What were your sources of inspiration when writing Cram,
and is any of it based on personal experience?
Yes. School was often a nightmare for me. I loved learning but I could
never find a way to fit into the single mold that had been cast
for students. I went to a rigorous math & science high school
in NYC, and if you couldn’t hack it there you were seen as
either unintelligent or lazy. It’s easy to internalize that sort
of feedback when you’re young, and it took me years to recover
my motivation. Cram’s
cinematographer and co-EP Felix Handte and I actually met there. Felix is one of the smartest people I’ve
ever known, so the fact that we were both not the best students
was always encouraging to me. A big chunk of Cram emerged out of
our shared desire to exorcize our academic demons.
The other piece came after I flunked out of college my first time
around, when I was struck by the sort of Faustian bargain we all
make with higher education — a pathway to “success” in
exchange for our youth and more money than most of us will ever
see. If the higher education system were a person, you’d call it
a vampire. So as we began to invite people onto the project, we
realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t just us bad students who
had nightmares, it was everyone. From there, Cram evolved into
this powerful desire to interrogate why the universal experience
of school is fear. What are we all so afraid of??
What can you tell us about the library you filmed large chunks of Cram
at, and what was it like filming there? And was the script written with
that specific location already in mind? After
screenings, people come up to me with guesses (usually wrong) as
to where the movie was filmed. Everyone thinks it’s their
college library. But I love that, I think the anonymity of the
space lends to the universality of the story - “Spooky Library”
is a metaphorical space, and we’ve all been there. And I’ll
tell you, filming in it was creepy! More often than not, our
approach to production design and cinematography was to respond to
the existing qualities of the space rather than layer too much on
top of it. Felix found consistently inventive ways to highlight
the oppressive rigidity of the space’s architecture and lean
into its cavernous feeling. Also a big shoutout to our sound designer Daniela Hart for bringing the space to such vivid life on
the soundtrack. Just like real life, she made sure there was
always a leaky pipe a couple rooms away…
Do talk about
your movie's approach to horror, and is that a genre at all dear to you,
and why (not)?
School is scary. It’s also full of silly nonsense. One of the cool
things about horror is how it allows you to literalize metaphor,
so in Cram, higher education isn’t just vampiric in spirit, but
in the flesh. Overall I wanted to express the fears we all
experience in academia without sensationalizing them, so much of
the horror in the movie is an expression of what Marc is
experiencing. There’s also a lot of fear to be mined from
existing academic textures like the blank page, dark stacks,
pencils, scantron forms, and blue exam books. I was insistent that
the scantron forms we use in the movie were the exact same ones I
used in school.
I do love horror, and I’ve always been attracted to explorations
of darkness, but it took me a while to dive in. I was always too
scared, too willing to cede to the seven-year-old kid who lives
inside my mind and thinks movies are real. But I took a life-changing class when I was in college (it happens!) called
Sex,
Gender, and Politics in the American Horror Film where we watched
four horror movies a week. By the end of the semester, I had
fallen in love with the genre. Also I’d been completely
desensitized.
A few words about your overall directorial approach to your story at hand?
As far as low budget indie films go, Cram is a fairly maximalist
undertaking. Dynamic camera moves with custom rigs, mechanical
puppets, an old movie within the movie, monster prosthetics, a
villain who speaks in iambic pentameter, an orchestral score, etc!
We loaded so much stuff into this movie, and I always felt that as
weird and out there as the story got, my job was to ground
everything in an emotional and psychological reality.
As a writer, I feel the best material is the stuff that feels like it
came from some mystical place beyond me. But as the director, I
have to be deliberate about the rules governing things, especially
a movie where anything can happen. Rules about what the camera can
and can’t do, the way my co-editor Trevor Wallace and I cut in
and out of scenes, the role music plays, etc. Maybe I’ll feel
differently when I’ve got more experience under my belt, but for
now the only way I know to keep a handle on things is by doing as
much homework as I can. Ironic, I know.
What can you tell us about Cram's key
cast, and why exactly these people?
Marc spends much of the movie on his own with nothing but the stacks
for a scene partner. It was crucial we find an actor whose
thoughts would be legible through action alone. I remember during
callbacks, John DiMino was reading for the scene where Marc
discovers his paper is missing, and before he started he collected
a bunch of props around him. All the other actors had done a bunch
of business to try to depict Marc’s thoughts but John was using
the props as a way to NOT deal with the terror of the moment. It
wasn’t “Oh no, my paper is missing!” it was “No no no, my
paper CAN’T be missing. It’s here right? Right??” It was
amazing! I could see the thoughts on his face. There’s something
undeniable about John, and it’s a gift to work with him. He’s
become a dear friend. You know it’s been said by some that John
DiMino is “the fourth O”, after Brando, DeNiro, and Pacino. I
wouldn’t dare though.
The Master of the Books was a different story. Brandon Burton and I
have been friends for over a decade, and while the world is
finally catching on to Brandon’s power (he recently made his
Broadway debut!) I’m not above a certain amount of pride in
having seen it early on. He’s electric, and I wrote the Master
of the Books with him in mind because honestly, how many people
are there in the world that can play a centuries-old academic
vampire who speaks in verse? Brandon’s one of the great
Shakespeare actors of his generation. Brandon came on board early
and helped craft the dialogue, teaching me loads about verse in
the process. I was lucky enough to see him as Falstaff in The
Merry Wives of Windsor at Shakespeare in the Park, and his ability to hold the audience in
the palm of his hand, and his facility with the language, all make
you forget just how hard what he’s doing is. But that degree of
control is a must for the Master of the Books, particularly given
how much of Brandon we’d be hiding behind layers of prosthetics
and heavy costuming (by the incredible Beatrice Sniper &
Alexandra Nyman respectively). That the character is a decrepit,
monstrous white man and Brandon an attractive young black man is
something we explored in-depth, and his dad to this day doesn’t
believe it’s Brandon playing the part.
Do talk about the shoot as such, and the on-set atmosphere!
I could talk for hours about the experience of making Cram. It was
frequently exhilarating, terrifying; the hardest thing I’ve ever
done and the most fulfilling. I couldn’t have done it without my
co-producers. We made half the movie just before the pandemic hit
and we had to shut down production. It was nine months before we
were able to continue, and during that long interim we were
uncertain if we’d ever finish the movie. Our heroic producer
Zachry J. Bailey did a tremendous job coordinating a safe
production before vaccines were available. I’ll never forget filming the party sequence in the movie. It was our
first couple days of shooting following the hiatus, and thanks to
Zack’s rigorous health and safety protocol, we all found
ourselves for the very first time since lockdown surrounded by
people! Everyone had so much pent-up energy, and I think you can
feel it on screen. I’m forever grateful that Cram was able to
employ so many artists at a time when we were struggling for work.
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And you know, the vibes on set always translate to the movie. As tough
as making Cram was, I’m always trying to remind myself and
everyone that we’re making a movie! How cool is that?
The $64-question, where can Cram
be seen? Great question! Catch Cram on Tubi, Prime Video, Google Play, and
elsewhere on-demand & streaming starting Friday, March 17th!!
Big shoutout to Terror Films for distributing the movie! Anything you can tell us about audience and
critical reception of Cram?
We’ve
been so lucky. Cram is an unusual movie with an unconventional
runtime (45 minutes), and when we began our festival run we
wondered how folks would respond. But the interesting thing is
that the only people to ever even mention it are gatekeepers in
the industry. Audiences love it, particularly broke students
trying to cram a movie in while studying for an exam.
After we premiered at the Austin Film Festival, people were coming up to
us on the street to tell us that Cram was their favorite movie
from the festival. We ended up winning the Audience Award for our
category at AFF, and the reviews coming out around then affirmed
that success. Our festival run continued with more success, and now
that reviews are coming out around the release, we’re thrilled
to continue to see people connecting with the movie on a deep and
personal level. It’s quite humbling and it means the world to
me that people see something of themselves and their experiences
in Cram. Horror has this amazing power to confront us with our
fears, and can be quite healing as a result. My hope is anyone who
watches Cram leaves feeling as though something inside them has
been unlocked, that they feel less alone.
Any future projects you'd like to share? Sure!
I’ve been working for years on this script about a woman who
loses her married lover to a horrific hot dog accident and winds
up falling for the fictional fast food hot dog company that killed
him. It’s a proper romance that really speaks to this strange
moment we’re in right now where corporations increasingly behave
like people online. Anyone brave enough to finance it will become
filthy rich. What got you into filmmaking to begin with, and
did you receive any formal education on the subject?
I flunked out of traditional film school. When I returned to
college, I ended up cobbling together my own major which combined
film with sociology, linguistics, and political science. I’ve
always been very interested in studying what a movie is and where
meaning comes from. How to make a movie is something I’ve never
felt comfortable learning in a classroom. Felix and I like to
figure stuff out ourselves.
The
real meat of my film education was when I was a kid. I was raised
in part by the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings. I
watched the behind-the-scenes material as much as I watched the
movies until I pretty much wore those discs out. Those box sets
taught me most of what really matters in filmmaking —
surrounding yourself with amazing people, refusing to quit no
matter how impossible the task, and being insane enough to
convince yourself and others that you’ve got the goods to pull
it all off.
What can you tell us about your filmwork prior to Cram? I’ve
done a bit of everything. Like most folks in the NYC indie film
world, I’ve made shorts, music videos, commercials, a ton of
educational media — much of it with Felix and Trevor and my team
at Rad
Rhino. I’ve never been the type of person who can put out
many original projects in a year. It takes me a long time to
produce original work, which is sadly a luxury not really afforded
young artists. But I don’t buy into the idea that filmmaking is
a race or that making art is a competition. I’d rather make
something that feels like honest self-expression than jump at
every opportunity. How would you describe yourself as a director?
The best thing about making movies is that they aren’t made alone.
Cram became the collaborative and communal education that was so
sorely missing from our own schooling. That type of atmosphere is
only possible when a director provides their collaborators with a
shared sense of creative ownership. It’s my responsibility to
allow my intentions to evolve in communion with the artistry of
others. I’ve heard other directors say that their job is to
fight for their movie and protect their vision against
interlopers, but I think that if you approach making movies as
conflict then your process will be filled with conflict. The idea
that the director is the sole steward of a vision is wrongheaded
to me.
Cram’s
composer Daniel Rudin once told me that he tries to cultivate a
creative practice that feels like play, which really resonates
with me. It’s less fun to play by yourself.
Filmmakers who inspire you? I
often admire filmmakers who feel idiosyncratic and explore
spirituality in a way that embraces how hostile our world is to
the spirit. David Lynch is a good example. He once said that
abstraction in a movie gives the audience room to dream, and I
think about that constantly. I’m very attracted to movies that
leave space for the audience. On the other hand, I’m also drawn
to filmmakers who play the audience like a fiddle. David
Fincher’s obsession with moving the camera in concert with the
mechanics of the human mind and body really speaks to me. Your
favourite movies? I’ve got a big anti-authority streak and the stories I tell tend to be
about people yearning for transcendence in a world that forces
material conformity. So all my favorite movies speak to that
feeling in some way. Scorcese’s The Age of Innocence, the
Wachowskis’ The Matrix Reloaded, Coppola’s Bram
Stoker’s Dracula. The list is endless and growing.
My favorite types of movie usually fall into a genre I call “dumb smart”, which refers to movies that have a superficial silliness
but real depth of feeling and true insight. I’ve been on a big
early Kathryn Bigelow kick, and Point Break really is one of the
greatest movies all time isn’t it? The way that movie explores
masculinity in crisis — both the beauty and the violence of it
— really moves me. You can’t help but think that Keanu and
Swayze could make out okay if they just made out. If they spoke
any love language other than force. And yet… men, you know?
... and of course, films you really
deplore? The
inverse of the “dumb smart” genre, “smart dumb” movies
tend to be those I like the least; which are movies that sort of
declare their Importance but feel spiritually empty because
they’re more about conveying a message than mining truth. But
making movies is hard! We talk about movies as though they reflect
the intentions of their authors in perpetuity but really they’re
time capsules. I’m not the same person who made Cram, you know?
There are things about the movie I’d do differently today. And
the movie is a testament to the version of me that made it. I
don’t believe anybody making movies sets out to make something
bad, and I do believe that everyone making art is doing their best
in every moment. So if you make a movie, you’ve done something
pretty cool, and if people hate it then at least they’re having
an authentic experience.
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Your/your movie's website, social media, whatever
else?
Movie website: https://radrhi.no/cram
Personal website: https://abiesidell.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/absidell
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/absidell/
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/absidell/
Anything else you're dying to mention and I have
merely forgotten to ask? I think the Cram score is a triumph. I feel like I can say that
because all I did was hire Dan and he’s the genius who composed
it. Watching that come together was one of the highlights of my
creative life and the Cram soundtrack is dropping soon so everyone
can listen to our credits track (Mom This Is) The Age of
Exhibition on repeat like I have for two years now. Thanks for the interview! Thank
you Mike for letting me dive deep! And to anyone out there who
checks out Cram, thank you for dreaming with us a while J
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