In the past decade, a series of directors have come out of the New York repertory film scene, people who’ve watched countless amounts of movies and have distilled that labor of pure love for cinema into films made within that context. Filmmakers like Ted Fendt, Gina Telaroli, and Ricky D’Ambrose jump to mind immediately in that context, as well as the resurgence of Dan Sallit, who since his 2012 feature The Unspeakable Act has managed to get more festival and theater distribution than ever before; or the case of Argentinian filmmaker Matías Piñeiro, who moved to New York to teach but also became a usual presence in the city at repertory cinemas. One thing all of these filmmakers have in common is a name that repeats in most of their recent work: Graham Swon as producer.
Graham Swon is also part of that intense type of cinephile filmmakers that was birthed out of the New York repertoire theaters. Graham studied theater directing at Carnegie Mellon and decided to move onto film. His work at the distributor Cinema Guild led to his first work as a producer with Counting (2015), directed by Jem Cohen, and his productions grew from there into a passion of bringing to reality the films that his friends wanted to make, films like Piñiero's Hermia & Helena (2016), Fendt's Classical Period (2018), and Sallitt's Fourteen (2019).
Swon’s feature debut as a director, The World is Full of Secrets, premiered at the Belfort Entrevous Film Festival in 2018, and has made the rounds in Canada, France, United States, Brazil, Chile, and soon it’ll be part of the Mar del Plata Film Festival in Argentina. This independent film features a group of teenager girls in 1997 who meet for a sleepover party, at which they issue a challenge: to tell the most frightening awful story they can.
Through the stories themselves, a foreboding voiceover, and the depiction of teenage rituals involving mirrors, blood and candles, Swon conjures an atmosphere of horror and dark unease. All of that captures both the feeling of a sleepover, but also that sensation of trying to stay awake at 3 am and discerning what’s happening on the horror movie that’s playing on the television.
The film mostly focuses on the faces of these girls who tell their stories, and Swon chooses to tell these stories uninterrupted, in a single shot, to draw us into the horror and violence that is frequently directed at women in these tales. The most unforgettable of these stories is the one told by Suzie (Ayla Guttman), a long tale of revenge between girlfriends who are the same age as the characters that are listening, involving stabbing, witchery, and unrequited love.
I spoke with Graham Swon on the phone to talk about his film, which opens Halloween night at Anthology Film Archives, and about his work as a producer for the past few years.
NOTEBOOK: What is the origin of the stories told in The World is Full of Secrets by the actresses?
SWON: The origin of the script was actually the long story about Mary-Anne, the story that’s told with the candles, that Suzie tells. I had started working on a script around that narrative that initially was something more, you know, direct: that was the subject, that was the plot, that was the film. While I was working on it I would get twenty pages into the script and come up to the point where the violence started to come in and I would think: “Ah, I don’t really wanna film this, I don’t really wanna show this, I don’t really wanna go out in a field with young girls and have them stabbing each other and everything else.” So there was something viscerally unpleasant about the idea of shooting it to me, and also about showing it on screen. But I was still interested in the narrative and the dynamics of the relationships between the characters, so I kept coming back to it. And then [I] hit upon the idea of having it told instead of shown, and the rest of the script really grew out of that decision, out of the idea that you can take on this element of the story being told that can allow the viewer to receive that story and receive the information in that story, and even think about the violence in that story, without it becoming oriented very heavily [on] the depiction of the violence and torture that happen. The rest grew out of that: having this kind of pseudo-Decameron type structure of people telling stories in a circle, and finding different relationships between different things from there.
All of these stories told in the film are based on real stories, sometimes multiple real stories. The names of the people are not the same, and some of the exact details are not the same, but I would say it’s influenced very heavily by a real story.
In terms of the Mary-Anne story: I read a lot of true crime, something that’s been interesting to me since I was young, and usually when we think of violence with adults, it’s usually men, relatively rarely women. And when we get adolescent violence, with young men you often see this kind of either lone wolf, or a pair of two people, organizing violence against others. And with young women it’s very often internal to the group: a group of friends, two or three really close friends killing another friend, and then lying about it. The Slenderman case was one that recently got a lot of press, but there are numerous cases like it. I think it possibly says something about a certain kind of psychology that goes on there, but also the cultural conditioning that dictates how young women might feel able to express violence, but I don’t want to over-psychoanalyze that.
NOTEBOOK: These long stories told by the characters feel natural, because they make mistakes, flubs and all. How did you work with these young actresses to have them remember them?
SWON: We rehearsed a lot. They’re written, not improvised at all, and they’re pretty close to word-perfect, actually. When we were auditioning, I was especially interested in looking for actors who had experience in theater, where memorizing that kind of quantity of text is maybe not common, but it’s not completely unheard of. I think in cinema it’s really rare, but in theater if you’re memorizing the entire contents of a play you’re learning more text than that, so it’s achievable. Some of the mistakes or little errors are written in, and some of them were kind of naturally occurring. I was interested in keeping a certain amount of that error, because I think it reflects more the way that people actually speak. I think that if they were doing these perfect clean monologues it wouldn’t resemble the way an actual 15-year old would tell a story.
NOTEBOOK: The World is Full of Secrets feels more connected to your work in theater than to your work as a producer, specially as it breaks out from a certain geography and even a sort of circle of common collaborators. Was this a conscious choice for you?
SWON: Obviously, the big difference between writing and directing something versus producing something, like when I’m working with Ricky, or Ted, or Matías, [is that] I’m a little bit more in like a midwife role rather than a mother role, if that makes sense. So there are some differences that are just my taste versus other peoples’ taste. The kind of actors that Ted Fendt uses are very connected to his life and where he’s from and are not the kind of performers who would also appear in one of Ricky’s films. So there are some differences there. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but I do think that I, at some point, have grown a little bit tired of the reality of shooting around city streets and apartments, which happens a lot in New York independent film for obvious reasons.
My experience in theatre was definitely hugely important in this film. I think a lot of what I am interested in, in terms of acting in particular, relates more directly to theatre than cinema. But one of the joys of cinema as an art form is the way it can incorporate other forms—so there can be here some theatre, some literature, some painting. I thought at one point of staging the script instead of filming it, but it would be a completely different piece; you cannot get that kind of intimacy with a human face in the theatre. Time functions completely differently in theatre. So even if there are many theatrical ideas, I think this is a fundamentally cinematic work and must be.
NOTEBOOK: The World is Full of Secrets has recently been part of the Youth Film Competition at the Valdivia Film Festival, and it’s now opening on Halloween at the Anthology Film Archives, which I think are two extremely different contexts. Is it a surprise to see this film have such diverse reception, both in terms of audience and programming?
SWON: It’s been interesting, because when it screened at Belfort Entrevous in France, they don’t have a Youth Film Competition the same way as Valdivia, but they also have a lot of high school students that attend that come in from around France, so for the first screening there it was almost all high school students [as in Valdivia]. Which I was initially worried about, that maybe they would find it boring, or that they wouldn’t connect to the more formal elements, but I’ve found now that it’s been shown that the younger audiences, teenage audiences, or college-age audiences often respond to it most strongly, which has been nice. Something I was really interested in doing with the film was to take some of the techniques in art cinema or experimental cinema, things like the long takes or the superimpositions, and put them in a popular narrative framework. And I always kind of hoped that they would be acceptable to people, that it would help people to access a different way to make films or think about films. And generally I found that to be the case.
Simultaneously, strictly because the film doesn’t fit evenly into any box, I had hoped, for instance, that it would screen in more genre festivals, where it largely hasn’t shown, because I think they see it too much as an art film, without the kind of conventional gore and scares that most contemporary horror films are built around. I think sometimes some of the art film crowds find it too wrapped up in the ideas of youth and genre and things like that, that are a little bit separate. I’ve been happy that the more it shows, I think the more it finds its audience, and I hope lot of more young people discovering it when it gets released on DVD and digital format, because I think probably not a huge number of them are going see it in theaters.
NOTEBOOK: Regarding the connection that teenage audiences have had with your movie, it reminds me of the kind of media they’re used to watch, the vlogs, the YouTube videos, which are often comprised of people talking to the camera in mostly uninterrupted shots.
SWON: Somebody else mentioned the same thing to me, that there was a similarity to the direct address and something in YouTube videos. It’s not a form that I’ve deeply explored [laughs], but I think it’s something interesting. It wasn’t something that I was thinking about consciously when I made it, so if it has a resonance I’m happy that it exists.
When I was finishing the edit for the film, [I heard of] an experimental television program in 1933 called The Television Ghost. And because of the television technology at that point, it was very rough: it’s not the type of technology that was ultimately used, they couldn’t move the camera, they couldn’t have too much movement within the frame. And the show was people standing, head and shoulder shots, looking directly at the camera, and they were ghosts telling the story of how they had died. And I thought, “ah, that’s amazing, that’s like somehow very close to the content of the film.” And I think there are resonances with those kinds of forms and different types of ideas of storytelling, which recycle themselves through different technologies.
NOTEBOOK: You’ve spoken before about how cinephilia became a sort of a code when it came to directing The World is Full of Secrets, especially when you worked with your cinematographer in trying to capture the style and lighting of the film. Since you’ve mostly worked with directors who are intense cinephiles and have the same background as you, does that code come into play when it comes to producing?
SWON: One of the things that you gain from cinephilia is a lot of different references to ways in which something can be done. By seeing a whole bunch of different films you have a lot of different things you can refer to in your mind of what’s possible. So I think, for sure, that even the idea to make some of those movies is made easier if you’ve watched a lot of Rohmer films, for instance, and you can say: “I know it’s possible, not just to make a movie, but to make a really good movie with five people in the crew, three apartments, no lights,” because you’ve seen it done, you know? So, that’s certainly a factor. I definitely think that an awareness of different modes of production helps you think about how to solve problems and make things that may appear to be difficult, possible for a production. I think about other movies a lot when I’m producing, although the language isn’t used in the same way as talking about how to light a shot, for instance.
I work with cinephilic directors because those are the people I’m friends with and I think we all, on some level, met from going to a lot of the same movies, and that circle moves out in different ways. After a certain number of times of seeing the same person in the theater you start talking to them, and that’s how you build these connections. I think New York cinephilia has been very healthy in the last decade, and that’s why there are a lot of interesting filmmakers coming out of it right now, and I’m happy to know them [laughs]. And I’m more interested in making the kind of movies those directors are interested in making than in working with, maybe, a more conventional commercial film school style of director.
For pretty much for all of the filmmakers that I work with, and even beyond other independent filmmakers working in America, there’s really no money in it, there’s not even really funding for it, so you end up really needing a group of people who care about it in a different way. I don’t think anyone is expecting to get rich or famous off of making these kind of films, it’s more out of an adoration and interest in the form, and what’s possible within it. And I think that, for all of us, comes out of watching a lot of movies and wanting to be closer to them.
NOTEBOOK: You’ve produced movies shot on film (Ted Fendt) and on digital (the later works of Dan Sallitt and Ricky D’Ambrose). What do you feel are the differences from the production point of view?
SWON: I think that there are differences, they’re not necessarily massive, and I think it’s more about your attitude. Film has something nice, because there’s a lot of pressure that goes onto a shoot, because the possibility of doing a lot of takes isn’t as financially comfortable. But something like Ted’s films, an awful lot of the budget ends up having to go to the analog materials, especially in the post-production. For example, in the case of Classical Period, where Ted really wanted not only to shoot on film, but also photo-chemically color-correct the film, have the negative cut… so the 16mm print of Classical Period is a fully analog object, which wasn’t the case for Short Stay [Ted Fendt, 2016], where we ended up having to scan the negative and then go back out to a 35mm blow-up. There’s definitely a big financial difference in how the money gets spent, because that’s a big weight on the production, it’s one of the reasons people moved to digital.
I think that at the end of the day it’s about thinking about what quality you need. I think a lot of filmmakers that I see using 16mm seem to be using it almost as a filter effect, something to give a pre-packaged feeling of a style or a mood. I don’t find that particularly interesting. I think Ted deals with film in a different way and is doing it very intimately, on a formal level, so I think it makes more sense for him to use it. I think often times if you don’t have a reason to be shooting on film, it’s putting a lot of pressure on you to do so, especially financial pressure.
And then, of course there are different possibilities and different things, like after Ted saw The World is Full of Secrets he said: “ah, it’s good you shot digitally, because [the length of] the shots wouldn’t be possible [on film].” You know? So, I think it’s good to think about what camera you’re using, and what the qualities of it are, and how you can pull something out of it, regardless of what you’re doing, but I don’t think it transforms most elements of the production, a lot of things stay relatively the same.
NOTEBOOK: Jem Cohen’s Counting is the first film you produced, how did you come on board?
SWON: Several of the filmmakers that I’ve worked with as a producer, I started with them as a distributor, because I worked a long time at Cinema Guild and then at Kino Lorber doing theatrical distribution. That’s how I met Matías, doing the release of Viola. At that time I met Dan Sallitt because I helped get a home video release for The Unspeakable Act, and that’s also how I met Jem, because I worked on the release of Museum Hours. My former boss at Cinema Guild, Ryan Krivoshey, who now runs Grasshopper Film, and I had worked really closely with Jem on all the elements in Museum Hours and had become really good friends with him. [Jem Cohen] had already shot all the material in Counting, he had been shooting the material over several years, traveling to festivals, when he was in different countries, he would shoot, shoot, shoot. Jem is somebody who’s always shooting. If you meet Jem in the street and walk with him for a few blocks, he may stop and take a camera out and shoot the corner for a few minutes. So, he’s always collecting material. With Counting, he had already shot everything and done a lot of the editing, but he needed help to get the money and organization to do the post-production and finish the film. Ryan and I came on and helped organize that and get the finishing funds, so I spent a lot of time with Jem doing the color correction and finishing that film, but I think really no one else other than Jem was really involved in capturing and planning the content, as much as it can be planned, as it’s a documentary of a certain way.
NOTEBOOK: What are the future projects in the works, both as director and producer?
SWON: There are lots of projects, but it's hard to know what will come next. Ideas are never the issue, only available resources. I'm working on a film around paintings with Matías Piñeiro, derived from an idea we have for a mode of production that resembles a game. I just finished writing a second feature of my own, an anti-civilization melodrama set in 1939 inspired in part by the writings and life of Barbara Newhall Follett. Cinema is so slow and costly, you just have to stay focused, and have faith that it will move forward in whatever shape it takes.
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