Q&A with Director Sean Price Williams and Screenwriter Nick Pinkerton

What was the genesis of this film?

Sean Price Williams: I remember being on a train with Nick one night, faced with a gaggle of preppy young people. Pretty sure they were visitors from another planet.  And Nick was staring with a dangerous, disagreeable look, to say the least.  It was early days in this important shift towards heightened polarity in America, which has only snowballed since. Nick and I are very proud of so much American history and culture.  The very proclamation of American patriotism in the twenty first century seems to ruffle feathers in most circles we spin within.  I think this simple fact inspired the film. MEDIUM COOL was an inspiration (prior to this moment, though).   I just wanted to try directing a movie. Nick is an absolute genius writer.  He wrote the best article online about the end of Kim’s Video.  I said, “Nick, you should write a script.”  He quickly wrote a sort of thirtysomething Ohio movie that I had zero connection to.  So I asked him to write something that we could both have fun with.The script is full of scenarios and characters that we are both convinced are based on our own experiences.  The confusion sort of supports a hope of universality. 

What inspired you to make your solo directorial debut?

Sean Price Williams: I always wanted to direct.  I never knew what a cinematographer was for some time.  I had to read the “Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary Cinematographers” book to figure it out. The interviews in that book assured me that it wasn’t all technical and that good taste was most important.  I became pretty preoccupied with trying to make the predominant medium in low budget films, miniDV, have some cinematic value.  I probably lost a good many years on that fruitless endeavor. I made a lot of wonderful stuff with friends that will likely never see the light of day. 

There have been many revelations in cinema that challenge what a director is or what a director does.  I think the respect the credit receives can greatly do a disservice to the profound collaborations that create such complex work. Certainly sometimes a director, in fact, paints the entire product with their personality.  These artists are few.

As a technician on many movies, I wanted to see if it was possible to make a movie like a band.  Not one artist.  But a band of creative people who really feel connected to the movie.  The crew on our film were a mix of old friends and new friends who like what they do.  It’s amazing that someone actually likes making schedules.  Someone likes script supervising.  Someone likes loading film.  Someone likes flagging a light.  I really had no interest in being looked at by the crew as director.  I take the credit ultimately because someone has to be held responsible for so many bizarre decisions. 

What was the collaboration between screenwriter and director like?

We are very close friends.  Nick’s extraordinary well of history and references. I enjoyed the writing so much; we filmed a silly amount of material.  I was sure we could pull off a three hour comedy adventure, something like O LUCKY MAN!

Nick was almost always on set, which was helpful to explain certain references and make clear the intentions of certain passages.  Also, he was always bringing more material. 

Again, many of the scenarios in the film are from his life and also mine.  Somehow we both seemed to have some experience of a girlfriend going missing in DC on a school trip.  We will likely argue always about what was inspired by what.  But the argument itself means that young people go through the same crap,  and not just in that one specific time period. 

What was the production like? What was the mood like on set?

Ask everyone on the movie about the mood.  I value their opinions.

It was so essential to me that everyone on set felt like they were having the best time they have ever had working.  It’s’ a mix of me wanting to be liked and me wanting to prove to some indie film judge in heaven that a good movie can be made without breaking anyone in half.  The spell was cast so well that our very first week of shooting, which was planned months ahead to be taking place upstate in the throes of winter and snow, in fact took place in the most pleasant t-shirt weather November had ever seen.  Our snow fantasy was a picnic.  Well ok.  We worked it into the film.  We always had an attitude of improvising when things didn’t go as we had hoped.  I think every curveball thrown at us turned our head in a better direction.  That continued all the way through the color grade and conform. 

How do you see THE SWEET EAST in a tradition of American road movies?

Sean Price Williams: We never thought of the film as a road movie during the conception.  A true road movie is something that is defined by rules.  Our finished film may or may not actually qualify, but, by the nature of a genre that is defined by rules, we didn’t consider the film as such.

Nick and I went on a road trip in 2017 or thereabouts to sort of scout out the inspirations of the early draft of the script.  We took many pictures and videos (most of which are thankfully lost) that probably would have been content for a more recognizable road movie. 

Nick Pinkerton:  I don’t see it in that tradition, particularly, because it’s more concerned with the various pit-stops its protagonist takes than with being “on the road,” per se. When you talk about the “American road movie” it kind of evokes wide-open Western spaces, and our movie is resolutely East coast, so if it does belong to any tradition like that, it’s the tradition of the Eastern seaboard road movie—like Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer’s great CANDY MOUNTAIN. Incidentally, we dropped in on Wurlitzer and his wife in Hudson, New York on a road trip we took to visit all of the locations in the script in 2017 or ’18, and there’s one road movie that he wrote the screenplay for—Monte Hellman’s TWO-LANE BLACKTOP—that might have been an oblique inspiration. It was shot in sequence, with the production slowly moving from Los Angeles to Memphis, like the characters are, and you really see the landscapes and the plant life change along the way. We weren’t able to shoot in sequence for several reasons, but we did try to fake things as little as possible, and to shoot things in the places they were set, the idea being that people would feel that sense of range and breadth in the finished film. 

Anyhow, I’ve tended to call the movie a picaresque instead—touches of Moll Flanders and Thackeray and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—though that isn’t entirely accurate either, because I see Lillian learning things over the course of it, which a true picaro doesn’t do. Maybe a little bit of Charterhouse of Parma, too; the way that Lillian moves between all of these different worlds with their vastly different customs and beliefs, it’s a bit like Stendhal’s adventurer moving between the different courts and kingdoms of pre-unification Italy. 

How did you cast Talia? Did she have any input into her character?

Sean Price Williams: Talia was the first person I met to play Lilian.  She impressed me in so many ways.  But she was the first, so, as a lover of film lore, I couldn’t really believe the first person would be the one.  I talked to others.  Really great people.  I was so impressed by so many people.  It was a thrill to discover so many bright young actors.  Talia came back with questions.  And it became clear that she understood the character more thoroughly than any of us.  I trusted her entirely.  If she didn’t buy a line, we cut it.  She had great suggestions for casting that we always went with. Her instincts were incredible and during the edit, she just impressed me more and more.  I had to believe that Talia was Lilian.  Now, I have gotten to know her well as a person and I see she really created Lilian and I am triple impressed.

 In many ways, this is an observational film–  you seem more interested in showing your protagonists as human beings, warts and all, rather than immediately judging them. Was that a conscious formal decision or did it simply emerge as you were dealing with the script?

Nick Pinkerton:  I never had much interest in expressly making condemnatory (or laudatory) judgements of any of the characters. I hope that all of the characters come off as both ridiculous and human, which basically amounts to the same thing.  

Sean Price Williams: I love movies where the bad guy has a black hat.  And the good guy is handsome.  The bad girl has hair covering one eye.  The good girl has curls in her hair.  It’s great for fast storytelling.  Our movie enjoys the fantastic truth that almost no one is just good or bad.  It’s important, more important than ever, to understand that every person contains a rainbow of at least two or three colors.