BR: For the first time in our work we brought in casting directors, two of our friends, Jesy and Lauren who ran a casting company out of New Orleans. Since we couldn't physically be up in Washington and Oregon for all the time required to cast this whole thing, they went up there for around three months ahead of us.

TR: The casting was the same as the shooting. There was a general idea, and then improvisation. Initially we had wanted four kids, then it got down to one, then back up to three. There weren't slots to fill. The casting directors would send us things to look at every day—casting reels and photos and descriptions. Bill and I were at home mapping all this out on a wall—like, this could work with this, this person could work over here. This influences this idea, this changes that one, maybe we could do this instead. we would go up there to meet with people in person, then come home and do it again. A lot of the leads we considered along the way ended up in different roles. By the end, those three boys were thick as thieves. The two girls were the same. Once we spent time with those two groups, and put them together, it was the five.

BR: And then it was as if they had known each other forever.

TR: Just as we remembered from growing up. You've got different friends who hold different weight, but they all hold each other. Meanwhile we had like a hundred other people. How would they relate to these five? Where could they exist? How could they be a message along the way? Like those train riders—how do they enter the picture and how can they help them get to here? And we love these older people—how in the hell do they end up with them? We were writing because of the characters, and casting because of the writing.

BR: Oh yeah, for sure. A lot of the voiceover in the film came from our interviews with them.They are talking about where they were in their lives.

BR: We had a booklet with, like, “this is what you can expect each day.”

TR: Kinda like summer camp.

BR: It really was like summer camp. We were very honest with them about what it was going to look like. We set the table by saying, yes, it’s a weird thing that we're about to do, but it's gonna be really fun and we'll take care of you. If it ever seems too fucked up or scary or uncomfortable, we will stop and talk about it. Which never happened. But we made sure to set the table.

TR: My first messages to Bill starting this conversation happened a month before the world shut down. We talked about revisiting this folder we started when we were like 18 called ‘Episodes of Delinquency’, a collection of ideas that has continued to grow over time. Pieces of it have found their way into everything we've ever made. Our inside working title for this film was that—Episodes of Delinquency. When we got into the pandemic we went back and forth about a couple of things. We thought about if we were still kids, in the town that we grew up in, dreaming of what was down the road and of another world, and trying to get out of there—during the pandemic it was not only feeling stuck, but you literally

couldn't leave. That was horrifying. The second thing was, if we were able to go back a hundred years to 1919, which was also a pandemic year with the Spanish flu, what would we want to see? It wasn't the news. It wasn't the big events. It was what it would look like if you looked out your window, if we didn't say it's The Pandemic, and you just were in the world, what would people's feelings be like?

BR: It was all very loose at the beginning. Like, how can we speak to these feelings, yet not speak to the time? I remember this kid on TikTok with 30 followers who was like “Hey, guys, let's socially distance on the beach,” and 20,000 people showed up because all these kids were stuck at home and wanted to do something—that would make a great movie. I would like to see it, honestly, but it’s too stuck in time—everything that we wanted to talk about is more universal than that.

TR: Initially the ideas were much more delinquent because, you know, that’s how we had been, but we’re working in a mode where the people within the film are the authors of their experience, and these kids interact with people in the world differently than we did as kids. There was hope, and there was a barter system of care. It ended up being this really beautiful, positive, loving and soulful thing, rather than something dark and delinquent. When we were growing up, if someone was different and walked up to you, you'd say, “fuck off”. Whereas with these kids, it was like, “Wow, you're different. Tell me all about it.”

BR: As the pandemic progressed, it felt like people needed their people, they needed release, and they wanted to venture out into the world. We slowly zeroed in on:what if we could catch the energy of all of us being shot back into the real world? And we prepared so that on the day that the lockdown lifted, we could start shooting.

TR: Yeah, we were over there on a scouting trip in September of 2020.

TR: I had planned a scouting trip to the Northwest that I didn't get to go on because the pandemic shut everything down. It’s an area I've traveled around quite a bit and really loved as a landscape. Also, in some of our references, like My Own Private Idaho and Stand By Me, that's the backdrop. We had most of the route planned by September 2020, then went back at least twice more and did it over again, walking through those landscapes, when we started shooting it was all location based. We shot for six weeks straight and it's linear every day.

BR: We started shooting the day that the mask mandate was lifted.

TR: It was a huge gamble because we didn't know, obviously, that the mask mandate was going to be lifted. We just started planning for a movie for a future tense that we had no idea was going to exist. It meant that the shoot was very alive. It was kind of like a summer of love for these kids and the people they encountered, because everybody was free all of a sudden.

TR: There were a lot of conversations about the Corps of Discovery. About frontiers, the American frontier, manifest Destiny, the frontier of self. What is the frontier for kids coming of age at this moment in time? What is the American dream anymore? As filmmakers we've always been place-based, but in

this film we wanted to stretch time and space. You go from desert to field to forest to river to the ocean, we knew it would be beautiful, but also that these kids would have to respond to different environments and to the people within those environments.

BR: Seven. It was like this traveling circus. We had a great group dynamic, and it was very sad when it was all over.

TR: There was never an “action” or “cut.” We kept it so that they were surprised and received things as they happened.

BR: They were always arriving at things that were already in motion.

TR: The onus was on us and our team to make sure that everything was set up without them having to consider any of it. They really were walking into these worlds, and it's them improvising based on stimuli and situation. Every new character also had their own intentions, had their own reasons why they were there, and brought pieces of themselves to it. And so those kids are encountering these people who are suddenly a part of this.

BR: I love working like this. Every step of the way is extremely alive and active, and you're writing in real time. We want it to be as hands-off as possible. But we would see something happening and be like, “Guys, why don't you take this conversation over there and really explore that idea?”

TR: But it couldn’t happen again. There's no do-overs.

BR: I still feel tired from it. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. The most exhausting thing I've ever done. Because there's no sitting behind the camera in a chair and yelling “Action.” If you don't show up to work at a hundred percent, then it sucks. The thing sucks and you ruin it for everybody.

TR: It's winning time all the time.

TR: The most choreographed thing that we did was the opening. We rehearsed it and rehearsed it.

BR: Originally it was like six minutes long. It totally set the wrong tone.

TR: We were learning what the film wants to be while we were doing it. We learned that on the ground and then we learned it in the edit. And with the opening it was that it needs to be a lot freer.

TR: It’s much more produced than it looks. Every night we had a real roof over our heads and everybody ate three times a day. It wasn't on the fly. This stuff was booked months in advance. The structure was there, and we couldn't deviate from it. There was no more money. There was no room for fucking it up. Some days we'd shoot for 15 hours, other days we shot for four so that we could move on and get the gear and other people in place, or so that Bill and I could do a rewrite.

TR: We had one bad day where they snuck off. We had an off day in Portland, and the boys decided to sneak out and go back home three hours away and visit their girlfriends and party.

BR: But they made it back just in time!

TR: Their hearts were still in it, but they were also like, “yeah, we're out.”

BR: Oh, of course. It's also why they were cast. They were kids that do stuff like that. But they're such good hearted kids. They were going to be back on time, they just weren’t going to miss other fun stuff going on.

TR: Life first. I mean, it's our mantra as well.

TR: The party really is a catharsis. They really are all crying at the end. They've come to the end of this fictional journey, but it's also been a real physical and emotional journey. So that day we all just lost it. Everyone was excited, happy, elated, dancing, screaming, exhausted, crying. When we all woke up from it, we went as a cast and crew and watched Goonies, and then had a party. Then we took them all to their hometowns and had parties with their friends or families or whoever was important to them, and then said our goodbyes.

They know what they went through. But still, it's hard to conceive of what a movie is, especially when it's not shot like a regular movie. We captured a moment in their lives that was genuine. They were 18, either getting out of school, or figuring out jobs and maybe getting out of mom's house, and what do you do about their high school girlfriend. Now it’s been two years since we wrapped, and life has moved on for all of them. They’re all roughly 20 and they work and they live on their own, they have bills, new

relationships and friendships have come and gone. I just can't imagine what it’s like to go online and see an announcement about the Venice Film Festival. How do you even conceive of that? I don't know. I think we made a really beautiful film with them, and that they were very present and beautiful and alive in their moment, but also that moment is now in the past.

BR: When we were thinking about casting Nat and Nicole, they were driving around listening to Cypress Hill, and we were rapping along and they were like, “Y'all know all the lyrics to this?” It’s like how in the late nineties I was listening to Jimi Hendrix. For them it’s listening to Ice Cube, you know? We initially bonded on liking the same music, which was really weird. So the songs are all the shit that they were listening to. Like in the beginning of the film when they're listening to Guns ‘n Roses, They knew every word to it.

TR: It’s one of the cool things about their generation that we had to learn. They don't have to tune into the radio, they have the internet, everything, all of time is present for them. They can talk about things that are only happening in, you know, Snapchat or TikTok, but they can also reference Bob Ross and Guns N Roses. It's all a part of their experience. It's not like they're fetishizing. It's all really there all the time.

TR: We made it twice as difficult because we did what we usually do and captured a lot of messy audio. Then had an edit that incorporated a lot of audio pieces that weren't from where they were shot. Then we decided to mix it with a team in Mexico City, for whom English is not even their first language, which made it really creative. It was a gamble that paid off because though it’s an American movie, it's a universal story. By mixing it outside of the states our collaborators could bring a lot of themselves to it. It

became much more about the emotional journey, stripping it down to what it really needed to be.

BR: We always keep a sound library of just lines that we like that don't really make any sense. But in a moment we can go, “What if Micah said that at that moment… hold on, let me pull that up.” And if it got a reaction in the room, we'd keep it. For the first couple days of us doing that they were like, “Guys, this is not usually how we work.” And we're like, well, are you cool with it? And they're like, this is very, very strange, but sure.

TR: You're building worlds mostly from audio that wasn't recorded in that moment. We’re reconstructing and reconsidering to make things more alive. Like the whole train sequence needed to be a living thing. It was a long process, but I think we ended up someplace sonically awesome. Like, it’s just vibrant. It's vibrating.

BR: We were very concerned with that because Oregon is so beautiful. There's something funny about cutting a beautiful shot short. We needed the movie to have the spirit of the kids, which was scatterbrained and all over the place.

TR: We did talk about this at the beginning. We didn't want to become overly enamored with the landscapes and have that affecting the information we’re sending across. We had to remind ourselves that we had chosen these landscapes because they're inherently beautiful. So no matter what we shoot, some of it is going to be beautiful. Instead we focused on the kids within these spaces.

TR: I mean, My Own Private Idaho, Stand by Me, “The Wasteland,” Easy Rider.

BR: Streetwise, always Streetwise

TR: “Up in the Old Hotel.” We looked at a lot of photography, like Todd Hido and Walker Evans.

BR: Wild Boys on the Road from 1933, which is an early William Wellman film. It's astonishing.

TR: Sam Shepherd and Edward Hopper and “Heart of Darkness” and so many essays. “Let America be America Again.” “Winesburg, Ohio.” “Frog and Toad are Friends,” The Wizard of Oz.

BR: Poem is a Naked Person. Just the freedom of that film that anything can happen at any time.

TR: We combed through so much music from when we were that age and tried to figure out why, tried to make sure that we came back to what those feelings were, how we felt them, why we felt them.

TR: There was so much that went into this that isn't necessarily overtly on the screen. But it was so much of it for us. These last few years have been so complicated for everyone. Finishing this feels a bit confusing because it's the end of an unbelievably daunting chapter of our lives. It's the most difficult thing that we've ever done.

TR: It's like when, towards the end of the film, Tony puts his head in his hands and Micah says, “What are we gonna do now?” And Tony says, “I don't know.” I feel just like Tony right now.

BR: We showed it to our mom. She wanted to see it and we're like, mom, I don't think this teenage stoner movie is for you. But she saw it, and the next day and was like, “This is by far your best film. I related to it more than anything you've ever done.” And we're like, wait, what?

TR: She says, yeah, I was a kid once too, you know, going through my own shit.

BR: Wow. Mom. Cool.