Staff Pick Premiere: A male director has dramatic relationships with his actresses
If beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, what else does that eye hold? Hate? Jealousy? Fear? They say nothing’s more important than a first impression, but what if an impression has already been made due to conscious or unconscious bias? How we see people literally affects how we treat them. For filmmakers, who are tasked with inventing characters rich in detail and history from all different ages and backgrounds, this can be daunting to get right. A director wants to make sure that the actors are correctly cast, the costumes are on-point, the locations feel right, and the script is sharp and believable. But at what point do their biases start affecting the script, the production, the direction, or the editing?
In Dustin Guy Defa’s deft short “Dramatic Relationships,” he playfully and pointedly examines the relationship between the actresses in his film and himself, the male director. Through a series of fictionalized vignettes, he subtlety pokes holes in the allowed bias, misogyny, sexism, mansplaining, interrupting, violence, and derision that can exist on film sets and does exist in real life. Defa mines these moments for humor, because it’s through showing the absurdity of what a man may say or do to a woman, yet never another man, that people can see the problems inherent in our unconscious biases. After screening at the New York Film Festival, AFI Film Festival and others, the short is premiering online alongside Defa’s newest feature film Person To Person, which screens this week at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.
Vimeo: Do you feel like your director to actor relationships are more dramatic with women than men?
Dustin Guy Defa: Not necessarily. I think every actor is different regardless of gender. However, I have realized that I’ve personally acted differently toward female actors in the past, and a lot of that has been surface-related, i.e. being more aware of how they appear physically than their male counterparts. That’s the reason for the scene where the director (me) has Hannah adjust her hair. The demand that women look a certain way to fulfill certain roles is one reason I made this movie.
Did the idea for this film come from self-reflection or observation? Did any of these vignettes come from your life or things you witnessed?
They are fiction and exaggerated fictions, and even silly fictions. But certainly they reflect common workplace environments in the filmmaking world.
There are certain male directors like Hitchcock, who are notorious for how they treated women. Did he and/or other directors come to mind while making this piece?
I really only thought of Blue Is The Warmest Color, my own decisions as a director in the past, and ideas about how other male directors who work within the realms of the male gaze nowadays might operate.
Many directors work in very different ways, can you explain how you see the job of director?
A guide.
Your new feature Person to Person premieres this week at Sundance Film Festival. It’s an expanded version of your excellent short by the same name. Can you talk a bit about the process of turning a short into a feature?
I never thought of turning the short into a feature. The only link that I ever saw between them was Bene Coopersmith who stars in both. And originally the title of the feature was different, so now that I’ve decided that Person to Person is the best title for it, it now appears that the feature is a complete extension of the short, which was never the plan. They are related though because of Bene and because of a certain tone and some themes, but otherwise they stand apart.
You’ve switched back and forth between shorts, features, and docs over the last decade. Do you prefer a form or do you just pick whatever serves the story best?
I’ve only been doing shorts because getting a feature made is so difficult. Shorts have been perfect ways to hone my skills, and I’ve grown to love it as a form. I prefer features, for the most part.
What are you working on now?
Writing something.
Well, I’m looking forward to reading and seeing it. Best of luck at Sundance!
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Originally published at Vimeo.com
