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Your new movie Self
Driver - in a few words, what's it about?
Self Driver follows a
down-on-his-luck cab driver through one night from hell after signing up
for a new app that promises fast, easy money. It's about the lengths one
will go to to make ends meet, and how desperation and financial
instability can be used to manipulate and dominate even the most moral
among us. What were your inspiration when writing Self
Driver, and is any of it based on personal experience? And to what
extent could you identify with the film's lead character?
I think in this day and age, unless you're one of "the
1%", we're all feeling the unease of our time. While I've
never worked as a rideshare driver, I do know what it's like to
work in a gig-economy and worry about whether you're going to be
able to make ends meet if a gig doesn't come your way.
The other thing that's been on my mind a lot is how
people behave when they think they have permission, or at
least know we're not going to get caught. How do we behave when no
one is looking? I think most of us can remember a time we may not have
acted perfectly morally, where maybe we knew it was wrong, but did
it anyway because we knew we could get away with it.
So in a world like this, where people are under
increasingly fraught financial stress, how does a person behave
when they feel like they have nothing to lose and a lot
to gain by breaking the rules? How do they behave when they're rewarded for breaking
them? Most of us like to think of ourselves as trying to be
good, moral people. But under the right circumstances anyone
can be manipulated into crossing lines they may think they never would. What
can you tell us about Self
Driver's approach to the thriller genre?
As a filmmaker I love to play with tone and atmosphere.
The thriller is ripe for exploration in those areas, which is what
initially drew me to the genre. At the same time I knew I didn't
want to make a "traditional' thriller. I loved the idea of building
a world that feels a little bit off, a little bit surreal. The nice thing about a thriller is that if it's well
constructed and you earn an audience's trust early on, I think
there's a lot of room to play and take things in unexpected directions. At
least to me, Self Driver
is also fueled by quite a bit of social commentary - so would you at all
agree, and if so, could you please elaborate on it?
Absolutely! The concept of the film began as a way to
talk about the direction I saw the world heading, and the increasing
instability of the labor market. People are being treated more and more
as a commodity and less and less as human beings with intrinsic value
beyond what productivity we bring to the market. It's scary to think
about where this leads in a world rapidly racing to replace human labor
completely. If society only values us for what we can produce, but
robots and AI can produce everything for next to nothing, where does
that leave the average human being?
The goal was to package those thoughts
into something that was equal parts entertaining and thought-provoking. Self
Driver is confined to a mere handful locations, and especially to
the inside of a car - so what were some of your techniques to keep the
film visually interesting throughout?
I love to work inside a box. Setting up a handful of
rules and seeing how creative we can get without breaking them is a lot
of fun for me. So the idea of keeping the camera inside the car for the
entire duration of the film felt like a fun creative problem for me to solve.
My main tactic to keep things interesting was to have the
camera style evolve as the story does. So as the night
progresses and our Driver begins to feel more and more trapped inside
the car, our camera mirrors that experience for the audience. The
film opens with wider images and looser framing on our Driver and moves
tighter and tighter over the course of the night so that by the end of
his shift we're sitting in extreme, almost too tight, close-ups. The
goal was to make the audience as desperate to get out of the car as the
Driver is. Do talk about your
overall directorial approach to your story at hand?
The nice thing about working in such a confined
space is that it really limited how much we could mess around
with the camera, which meant we had a lot of time to play with and hone performances.
Often, once the cameras were set up, we would drive loops around a
neighbourhood running a scene and then improvising around it to see what
we might discover in the moment. It was a lot of fun, and my favorite
way to work with actors. A lot of what ended up in the film is stuff we discovered
in that process. Stuff I would never in a million years have been able
to come up with on my own!
What can you tell us about Self
Driver's cast, and why exactly these people?
Casting the film was one of the larger challenges of
production. Nathanael Chadwick, who plays D, was on board from the very
beginning, but filling out the rest of the cast was tricky because our prep
schedule was really condensed. I was mostly interested in working
with people with interesting looks and energies. People that felt at home
in the off-kilter world we were building.
In the end we found a lot of people through friends and
our local community of actors and filmmakers. I'm incredibly grateful to
everyone who lent us their talent and came along for the ride. A
few words about the shoot as such, and the on-set atmosphere?
The atmosphere on set was great! With a small but mighty
crew of a few film students we managed pull the whole thing off. I think
everyone understood this was going to be a very different type of
production and rallied to make it happen. The
$64 question of course, where can Self
Driver be seen? Self
Driver will be available on VOD on June 6th. Anything you can tell us about
audience and critical reception of Self
Driver yet? Making a film like Self
Driver, with a minimal budget and
minimal resources is always an uphill battle. But putting an indie film
like this out in the world, and getting it the attention we think it
deserves, is an even larger hill to climb.
I'm so grateful to have had the chance to take the film
to festivals around the world, from Brazil to the UK, and watch it
with all sorts of audiences. It's always a thrill to feel the
energy in a room change as the film plays and the audience experiences
the ride for the first time.
Any future projects you'd like to
share? I'm working on a new feature, hoping to shoot this
summer with a bunch of the same team that helped make Self Driver. So
stay tuned! What got you into filmmaking to begin with, and
did you receive any formal training on the subject?
Making movies has been a dream of mine since I was a kid.
I was fortunate enough to go to film school up here in Canada. What
can you tell us about your filmwork prior to Self
Driver?
I've made a handful of low-budget short films over a
decade ago, a lot of mumblecore adjacent relationship dramas,
but Self Driver is my feature film debut and my first attempt at a thriller.
How would you describe yourself as a
director? I think I'm a pretty flexible director. I
find that once the parameters are established, a lot of fun, interesting, exciting
things can be discovered if we don't worry too much about sticking
to the script. I like to set up a few simple rules,
define what the trajectory and intention of a scene is, and then
play in it. I think most actors are at their best when they're
afforded the room to explore and discover in the moment, and as long as
we're all on the same page about the fundamentals a lot of really
interesting stuff can come out of that process.
I think a big part of my approach as a
director comes from my many years working as an editor. It's given me
the confidence to know that as long as we're covering the main beats of
a story, a lot can be built in the editing room. And the more options we
have going into it, the richer the final product can be!
Filmmakers who inspire you?
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That's a tough one. I love the moral, almost
fabelistic, storytelling of Lars Von Trier, the energy of the Safdies,
the clean, precise, craftsmanship of Coppola, the dreamlike
hallucinations of Fellini. Your
favourite movies? Off the top of my head, in no particular
order, The Conversation,
8 1/2, True
Stories, Breaking the Waves, Kurosawa's Dreams... ... and of course, films you really
deplore? NONE! Every film, even the worst ones ever made are
a gift! Your/your movie's website, social media,
whatever else? I guess the best place to keep track of
the film is my personal Instagram: @m_pierro.
Anything else you're dying to mention and
I have merely forgotten to ask? Can't think of anything, but feel free to reach out
if you have any follow ups or want any clarification! Thanks for the
interview! Thank you!!!
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