When you imagine a movie set in the world, you think of something like fancy galleries and auctions and things like that. The art in this movie is high stakes for the characters, but it’s not like there’s some big sale at the end of the movie. The work is so personal. I’m interested in why you wanted to depict art on that scale.
People make art for reasons other than money. People make art because they’re compelled to, it’s how they deal with the world or how they translate things to the world. For some people it’s like food. You need to sit down at the table every day and work or go to your studio every day and for other things to have some kind of balance to them. So if you’re so compelled, how do you arrange that time and that energy around your life of work and family and friends and paying rent and all those things? And how do those things play back into the work you’re making?
We were interested in showing the process of making stuff and not the highlight moments, but the moments that occur every day.
When you come from the world of film, where money is such an unavoidable part of the process, does it give you a different view of the work? Or is it more similar to your work than I imagine?
Just going into these studios and watching artists work—I made a couple of short films of artists working while we were working on the script. I filmed Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and her studio is nearby our camera house in Portland. If I’m ever overwhelmed, I go to Jessica’s studio, and you’re looking at someone who can just touch things and doesn’t need 50 people to do anything. You just touch it and you could actually, at the end of the day, look at what you made.
It’s funny, everything comes with some price tag. I was just going out before we even started and buying [art] supplies for Hong and Michelle and I was like, oh my God, they cost this much.
It made me wonder if you ever felt jealous of that singular focus, like it’s me and my clay and that’s all it takes to make my art.
Absolutely. And yet, you know, I’m working with Jon Raymond early, and then I have this time on my own where I’m sort of, in this case, figuring out the school or figuring out how it’s going to be shot. And then just seeing that whole school come to life where there’s so many people, in every room building stuff.
You made a whole world that didn’t exist.
And that would not have happened alone at a table making clay. There’s a point where there’s a lot of energy for me to feed off of that comes with the shared experience. And then there’s a whole separate world of production that’s going on where the producers and all the facilitators are figuring out how to make all this work. And you go over their world and you’re like, how fortunate to have so many people working towards this. And then you get back alone again in the editing room and things quiet down and you can meet your project again on your own by yourself.
