In making this film I sought to address a topic appropriate for someone my age – death, and its social impact. I wished to discard as much conventional narrative tissue, as well as the usual cinematic language normally used, and to go as directly as possible to the emotional core of the matter. While not evident on the surface, the film is intended as a portrait of a larger family – that of America.
I gathered my actors, all of whom had worked with me before, and filmmaker James Benning who plays the father, in Butte Montana, where the work was written through improvising, until we arrived at a clear line, and I had experimented with the visual presentation sufficiently to decide what the aesthetics of the film would be. We took about 3 weeks to make the film.
Quote from Chris Fujiwara, director of Edinburgh Festival on inviting film to participate (I had to reject this invitation.)
“It’s a remarkable film, with images and transitions of great beauty and intensity. I value in it most the fact that it is a digital film, not a “film” that happened to be shot and edited digitally. You do great things with digital that could not be done on film. Above all, you show how digital makes possible a distinctive shaping of time, in a mode that is neither “virtual” nor “real,” but which has to do, I would say, with an immediate perception of time becoming an image.”
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