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Interview: Joe Swanberg Pays Visit to ‘Uncle Kent’
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CHICAGO – Few filmmakers have proven to be as effortlessly prolific as Chicago-based writer/director/producer/actor Joe Swanberg. Since 2005, he’s released one directorial feature per year, with the exception of 2010. This year, he could potentially release seven pictures (three of them have already made the festival rounds). “Uncle Kent” played at Sundance, while “Silver Bullets” and “Art History” were screened at Berlinale.
“Kent,” which opens April 29 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, stars Kent Osborne (of “Hannah Takes the Stairs”) as a fortysomething animator who falls for the woman (Jennifer Prediger) he met on Chatroulette. It’s Swanberg’s latest exploration of relationships enhanced and hindered by technology, as well as one of the filmmaker’s most singular character portraits. Both “Bullets” and “History” are about the creative process of filmmaking, with Swanberg and his crew playing semi-fictionalized versions of themselves. Hollywood Chicago spoke with Swanberg about his various new projects, his evolution as a filmmaker, and the reason why “Kent” re-opened his “creative floodgates.”
HollywoodChicago.com: Is it true that you avoid reading about yourself online?
Joe Swanberg: Yes, I totally stopped doing that for my own mental health because it wasn’t helpful. I steer clear of all of that.
HollywoodChicago.com: There was a very complimentary piece written by Richard Brody in “The New Yorker” that compared your work to the films of Maurice Pialat, who you’ve cited as an influence. How has Pialat influenced your work?
Swanberg: I really like his movies. I saw a lot of his work all in a period of a week because there was a retrospective of his stuff traveling around. It just left a really deep impression on me. One of the things that tends to happen with me is when I really like something, my initial response to it is negative. Then after some time passes, I usually realize that I didn’t like it because I’m either jealous of it or they got at something that I’ve been trying to get at, but in a different way. So I’m initially pushed away by it and then as time passes, I realize that I really love it. A few of his films I liked right away, and a few of them were a little too grueling, but they stayed with me more than anything else.
![]() Josephine Decker and Joe Swanberg star in Swanberg’s Art History. Photo credit: Joe Swanberg |
His film “We Won’t Grow Old Together”—I had a really hard time sitting through it the first time, but then it was the one that I thought about the most afterward. It was a big influence on “Nights and Weekends.” I really like the way he deals with passage of time. He just cuts from one thing to the next, and six months may have passed in between cuts, but there’s no attention drawn to it. In his film “À nos amours,” [Suzanne] says that she’s going away to school for six months. She’s having a conversation with somebody and then in the very next scene, she’s back and in a mall with her friends. The six months just disappear. [laughs] No montage or no anything. Those are the sort of technical things I’m into, but I also like the subject matter he tackles. I like the actors he uses and the directness of the films.
HollywoodChicago.com: The performance style in “À nos amours,” particularly in regard to Suzanne [played by Sandrine Bonnaire], seems like it would appeal to your sensibilities.
Swanberg: Yeah, yeah absolutely.
HollywoodChicago.com: The atmosphere you create onset seems to make your actors feel as if they are participants in a team, rather than under the direction of a single person.
Swanberg: I think so, I hope so. In the best-case scenario, everyone’s equally invested in the project. Also, in [“À nos amours”], Pialat acts in the film, and sort of directs from within the scene, which is something I tend to do as well. By casting myself, it allows me to guide the performances internally.
HollywoodChicago.com: There’s a rumor going around that you’re currently working on no less than seven films…
Swanberg: Yeah, it is true. I’m hoping that they’ll all be screening by the end of the year. It’s just difficult to figure out what film is going to show at what place, and how all that stuff is going to work. But four of them will definitely be out this year, and then the other three might, if I can find festivals that want to show them or finish them up and put them out myself. One of the reasons why I want to try and get them out this year is because I have more films that I want to make. I don’t want to have a giant pile up, where the films are all waiting to show somewhere. I’m kind of anxious to get the ones that I finished out into the world so the ones that I’m working on and still going to make this year can also expect to see the light of day at a reasonable time.
HollywoodChicago.com: Have they all been in various stages of production over various time periods, or did they all just come to fruition this year?
Swanberg: Well, “Silver Bullets” was the one I was working on for a long time. I made the rest of them mostly in the summer months between May and September of last year. So there was a two-year period of really slow work on “Silver Bullets,” and then a really quick period of about a couple months where I did a lot of work on most of the others.
HollywoodChicago.com: Was there a certain indecision over what project you wanted to tackle in 2010?
Swanberg: I was working the whole time. I did another season of “Young American Bodies,” the web show that I do, and working on “Silver Bullets.” It was weird, it didn’t feel like I had taken any time off. It’s just that I usually had a film finished every year, and that particular year, I could’ve rushed to finish “Silver Bullets” and started showing it around, but it didn’t feel ready for me, so I made the decision to keep working on it. But I felt busy. I’m sure a lot of filmmakers who only have one film come out every few years have that experience where you’ve been working the whole time and have nothing to show for it yet. And now, this year is the opposite problem, where most of the work I’m doing is producing work, trying to figure out how to show seven films without cannibalizing the audience for each of them.
![]() Joe Swanberg and Kate Lyn Sheil star in Swanberg’s Silver Bullets. Photo credit: Joe Swanberg |
HollywoodChicago.com: In a SXSW interview, you referred to “Silver Bullets” as an embarrassing time capsule for you personally, where your character’s creative doubts mirrored your own. How so?
Swanberg: “Silver Bullets” was my chance to work through that period, rather than put my tail between my legs and run away. But it definitely was a low point for me as far as motivation to keep working. The ideas didn’t seem interesting to me, or they didn’t seem like enough. I just couldn’t figure out why I had devoted the last five years to making movies. Movies in general just seemed like a really pointless thing to do with my time and energy. And then I worked through it and kind of got it back, or at least got excited again about the process of making movies. But I think a lot of it had to do with figuring out what I wanted, and I felt like “Alexander the Last” was something that I had made for other people as much as for me. I had been working on another project for a year that I ended up not making. It was coinciding with this period where even though I was making independent films, it started to feel like a job more than I wanted it to.
So “Silver Bullets” was also an attempt to get back my own personal reasons for doing this stuff. I didn’t start out making movies to make money or to have them be commercial products. It happened accidentally. I didn’t think that I was making the kind of work that was commercial. Because of “mumblecore” and a lot of other reasons, the work became commercial in a sense, or at least commercial to a small cinephile audience. Suddenly, other people were interested in me—other producers and people with money. That experience was really weird, and then I half-heartedly pursued some of that, and ultimately it was really unsatisfying. “Silver Bullets” was an excuse to get back to, ‘I’m just going to spend my own money, we’re going to work at our own pace, I’m going to cast who I want to cast. I going to change the idea halfway through if I feel like it.’ You know, just freeing myself again to do that kind of work.
And then once I went out to LA and made “Uncle Kent,” it was like the floodgates opened again and I was totally working on my own terms, completely outside of any commercial prospects or anything like that. I was making movies again for a few thousand dollars with my friends, and that was why I liked [filmmaking] in the first place. So, suddenly once I realized I could like it again, I had all these other ideas that just came spilling out, and were all made in that kind of quick, cheap way with people who I like. Now that I have that momentum back, I just want to keep going with it.
![Jennifer Prediger, Josephine Decker and Kent Osborne star in Joe Swanberg’s Uncle Kent. Jennifer Prediger, Josephine Decker and Kent Osborne star in Joe Swanberg’s Uncle Kent.](http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/sites/default/files/STILL1-3-1.jpg)
Jennifer Prediger, Josephine Decker and Kent Osborne star in Joe Swanberg’s Uncle Kent.
Photo credit: IFC Films
HollywoodChicago.com: Did “Alexander the Last” feel like work to you?
Swanberg: The shooting of the movie was really fun, but there was an expectation around it, because I was working with Noah Baumbach and because I was working with Jess Weixler and Jane Adams and people who were definitely more well known than anybody I had ever worked with. There was a sense that I had put [pressure] on myself, not because anybody pressured me, but because I felt like I had to be serious about it because these people were professionals. I couldn’t go in and just screw around and figure it out. I had to go in and know what I was going to do and try and execute it. If you were to observe it from the outside, you probably wouldn’t notice much difference between that production and anything else I’ve made, but internally it was a big difference for me and I didn’t like it. I just didn’t want any kind of pressure around the movie, or any expectations around it either.
It was coinciding too with a period where I felt like I had a target on my chest. My movies had been singled out as being really sloppy while some of the other “mumblecore” directors—like [Andrew] Bujalski was ‘the purest’ and he shot on film and was a real artist, and then Aaron Katz was ‘a poet’ with this beautiful cinematography, and I was just like this terrible hack who made these really crappy looking, s—-ty movies with his friends. That’s why I just had to stop reading anything written about me because as soon as I stopped reading it, it went away. It was amazing how small the audiences were for that stuff. As soon as I turned it off, I realized it was probably a thousand film nerds who ever cared or read any of that stuff, and they’re all writing for each other. So stepping away from that gave me back a lot of momentum and removed any of that internal pressure to produce work or justify the time somebody gave me. I could go into a movie with some friends of mine and just say, ‘Maybe we’ll shoot this in a week, maybe it’ll take two years, I don’t know. Don’t expect anything from it, don’t expect anybody’s going to see it. Let’s just make it for the sake of making it.’ After five years of dabbling with that commercial stuff, as soon as I totally gave it up and started going back to making these tiny movies with my friends, suddenly Sundance and Berlin and all these festivals that have rejected everything that I’ve made start programming my work.
It’s a very weird experience where I was like, ‘Okay, good, I’m going to go underground and go back to making these tiny movies,’ and then suddenly they’re getting more attention than any of the other ones have ever gotten. It’s perfect for me, it’s exactly what I would want. I really am making tiny, tiny work that’s completely uncompromising, and at the same time, I feel like I’ve passed a certain hump where people have given up on thinking I’ll disappear, and they have to start dealing with me a little bit, whether they like it or not. With Sundance, it was like, ‘Well, it’s been six years, he’s still around, maybe we oughta show one of his movies.’ [laughs] So it’s kind of nice that those things happened together, and then from a superficial standpoint, I’ve been rewarded with that attention for making work that I believed in. It might have f—ked me up a little more if I had made work for money and then had been rewarded. It would’ve sent the wrong message that the only way to be validated by those organizations would be to compromise myself. So I feel really good that I’m making work that is not compromised, and that I’m receiving enough external validation to oil whatever disgusting part of the machine needs oiling.
![Kent Osborne stars in Joe Swanberg’s Uncle Kent. Kent Osborne stars in Joe Swanberg’s Uncle Kent.](http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/sites/default/files/STILL3-2-1.jpg)
Kent Osborne stars in Joe Swanberg’s Uncle Kent.
Photo credit: IFC Films
HollywoodChicago.com: Had Baumbach given you any advice on how to make your work more commercially viable without compromising yourself artistically?
Swanberg: One of the nice things about working with him was we didn’t really talk about that stuff. It was always very much about the work. I just don’t think either of us have much of a stomach for business conversations, and so we talked about other stuff. We talked about music or books [laughs]. It was a really nice friendship to have during that period. It seemed separate from the industry even though the source of the friendship was making movies.
HollywoodChicago.com: I think “Uncle Kent” would make an intriguing double bill with Baumbach’s “Greenberg,” since they’re both about middle-aged men struggling with arrested development. What attracted you to exploring the life of a fortysomething character?
Swanberg: Kent is someone who I love working with. Ever since we did “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” I’ve been looking for a reason to make another movie with him. It was less that I wanted to tackle middle age and more that I was just interested in working with Kent, and what comes along with that is making Kent’s life the subject of the story. That movie was just really healing for me. As I said before, once I made it, the floodgates opened and I felt totally fine about being a filmmaker again. There’s a special quality that Kent has. When you work with friends and everybody plays [versions of] themselves, people are less caught up in acting in the traditional sense. Professional actors are good at playing somebody else, and I realized that I wasn’t very interested in that. I’m more interested in making portraits of people that I know. There’s room for fiction in there but it doesn’t have to be all this performance. It can just be a little more natural. So it was really just a good experience. It was fun to make a story about someone who was older than me, and sort of think about that for a little while.
HollywoodChicago.com: How did this version of Kent grow out of your friendship and collaboration?
Swanberg: One of the things that gave me confidence was the fact that it’s really hard to dislike Kent, so I thought we could give his character some of the negative aspects that he feels about his lifestyle without making him unappealing. In a way, I feel that Greenberg is totally unappealing to spend time with. That doesn’t bother me, I like going to see movies about unappealing characters, I’m not put off by it, I’m not afraid of having that experience. But I didn’t feel like I was going throw Kent under the bus if we only highlighted certain aspects of his life. It felt like he would still come across really well because he’s such a warm, open person. And then we just wanted to tell a particular story, and there wasn’t room in that story to fit all of Kent into it. So we just had to pick and choose which aspects would fit with what we wanted to say.
HollywoodChicago.com: Jennifer Prediger is a real find in this film. How did you discover her?
Swanberg: She’s someone I’ve known for a couple years. She used to work at Nerve.com when I was doing “Young American Bodies” for them. So I sort of knew her through that, and then I would see her around every once in a while. Probably a year before we started making “Uncle Kent,” she and I started talking about working together on something. At the time, I had no idea what that thing would be. Then when Kent and I found a window to work together, I was like, “Oh right, I should call Jenny. She’d be perfect for this.” So it was a nice coincidence of not rushing it, having someone in mind for several years and then finding the project that made the most sense. Josephine [Decker], the girl they meet on Craigslist, was somebody I had met a few months before. She’s a director. Neither she nor Jenny had ever acted in movie before. I’m used to working with nonprofessional actors who aren’t coming to the film with expectations about how it’s going to help their career or hurt their career [laughs]. I just want to work with people who are open to having that one experience be the focus of everyone’s attention. If that leads to more work together then that’s great, but if not, nobody’s hurt by it.
![Jennifer Prediger and Kent Osborne star in Joe Swanberg’s Uncle Kent. Jennifer Prediger and Kent Osborne star in Joe Swanberg’s Uncle Kent.](http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/sites/default/files/STILL2-2-1.jpg)
Jennifer Prediger and Kent Osborne star in Joe Swanberg’s Uncle Kent.
Photo credit: IFC Films
HollywoodChicago.com: Your cinematography in “Kent” is quite different from much of your earlier work. How would you say your visual style has evolved over the years?
Swanberg: I set some rules for myself in a bunch of the early films that I just don’t have anymore, such as only shooting handheld, not blocking the actors, letting the camera be beholden to the actors and not the other way around. These were all things that from a political and philosophical standpoint I believed in and it was the way I wanted to make my work. I wanted to focus on performance and I wanted to give the actors complete freedom. If they decided to stand up and walk into the kitchen, the camera just had to figure out how to deal with that. The challenge for me was to try and create nice frames out of the chaos of what’s happening, the same way that a documentary filmmaker has to. And then I just reached a point where that started to feel like a trap that I was setting for myself, and I became a little less afraid of using film language that I had been taught in film school.
Early on, I was just trying to escape the monotony of movies. Most of them speak the same language, which just gets really boring. So I was setting rules in the same way Lars von Trier set rules to try and shake things up a bit. And now I’m not setting those rules. I’m embracing film language a little bit to see if there’s something exciting in there that I can play around with. “Uncle Kent” is shot almost entirely on a tripod. If you asked me five years ago, I’d have said that I would never use a tripod ever. Now it’s exciting to break my own rules and to accept and acknowledge that I have a lot to learn and that the only way to get better at anything is to practice it. Cinematography is something that I want to be good at. Each film is a chance to practice and improve. From the very beginning, I wanted “Uncle Kent” to feel like a graphic novel. The framing is all very deliberate to look like frames out of a graphic novel, and the pacing is meant to feel like that of a graphic novel. I wanted to try and capture that, which makes sense with the tripod and these locked in frames.
HollywoodChicago.com: There’s a rather infamous sequence in your directorial debut, ‘Kissing on the Mouth,’ in which you are seen masturbating. Was that scene intended as a “bring it on” to critics who might label a film that intimate and personal as a form of masturbation unto itself?
Swanberg: I was aware of the humor in masturbating in a film that could be called masturbatory by critics. That wasn’t lost on me. But the main thing that was happening to me at the time was I couldn’t figure out why films weren’t showing that kind of stuff. It felt like everyone had just agreed and decided that the line was drawn at a certain place, and then coming out of film school and feeling like anything is possible, I was like, “Why did everyone draw the line at that place?” Let’s just go past that line and see what happens. And so we did and from a commercial standpoint, I totally understand why that line is drawn. As soon as we showed the film at SXSW, everybody said, ‘Well, we can’t distribute that. We can’t put that on DVD. We can’t do anything with it.’ Then it played a few festivals and went away until it came out on DVD and then it did really well.
What I’m trying to do is move my films into whatever part of the world they ought to be in and then let the commercial stuff be a secondary thought. So with “Uncle Kent,” there’s a lot of male frontal masturbation in that movie [laughs], but the thing is, if you go on Chatroulette, that’s what you’re going to see. If you’re making a studio film, or even an independent film with any sort of commercial mindset, the mentality is, ‘We have to convey that without showing it.’ My feeling is that it’s our responsibility as filmmakers to show it. Or just don’t make a movie where they go on Chatroulette if you’re afraid of delving into that territory. One of the truly liberating things about being a filmmaker right now is that the films don’t cost much to make. I feel like I owe it to myself not to take that commercial stuff into account because I don’t have to. If I can make the film for a few thousand dollars, I just have to save up enough money where I don’t mind if I never make it back.
![]() Joe Swanberg stars in his directorial debut Kissing on the Mouth. Photo credit: Joe Swanberg |
HollywoodChicago.com: From what I’ve heard about “Art History” it sounds like it could be read as a similar “bring it on” to critics who would charge you with exploiting your actors.
Swanberg: I wouldn’t call the movie a challenge to people in that way, but “Silver Bullets” and “Art History” are definitely both chances for me to play the version of myself that people tend to criticize. It’s really weird, I feel like that criticism comes up in movies where it has nothing to do with the subject matter. I felt like if people were going to talk about it anyway, I might as well make a movie about it so that we have a reason for it to be in the conversation. In both films, I’m playing myself in a sense and I’m also [exploring] a lot of the manipulation and weird mind games that come along with filmmaking, or that would come along in any relationship, particularly in relationships between directors and actors, and directors and actresses. I’m not trying to challenge anybody or stick my middle finger up at anybody in particular, but I’m definitely interested in exploring that theme, and I’m also interested in admitting my own guilt at occasionally playing those games with the people that I work with.
From the very beginning, I’ve found it more interesting to cast myself as the bad guy in my movies, even though there really isn’t a “bad guy.” In “Kissing on the Mouth,” the character I play is this really immature, manipulative kind of guy who likes this girl and is totally self-absorbed and jealous of this other guy, and in “LOL,” I’m this really crummy boyfriend who’s much more interested in the Internet than his girlfriend. I really want to explore these things that I see in myself that I’m not very proud of, and so in “Silver Bullets” and “Art History,” that’s something I’m exploring as far as that’s concerned—the dynamics on a movie set and my own ability to be manipulative or dishonest. Hopefully that opens up a helpful, interesting discussion because it’s not limited to just me [laughs]. It’s something that other people ought to be thinking about, and I want the work to be helpful to people.
HollywoodChicago.com: Last question: will we see another season of ‘Young American Bodies’?
Swanberg: I hope so. We don’t have any immediate plans right now but it’s something that I would like to do. So as soon as that makes sense for me time-wise, then I think we will try it again.
HollywoodChicago.com: I’m still hanging on what happens after those two girls make out on the couch…
Swanberg: I know. We had no idea that was going to be the last episode for a long time. It’s very cliffhanger-y. [laughs]
![]() | By MATT FAGERHOLM |