Short films in Focus: Q & A with the director “Living Reality” Philip Thompson | Short films to the point

Philip Thompson’s “living reality” takes viewers into a strange trip through a terrible television sitcom, where the characters recite lines that hack the writers that the television characters should say, and a video collage of real moments that contrast with everything else. When you get back and think about it, what the main character experiences is no different from the imagined conversations that we think we have if we could only be full of mind and fast in the moment, and the clumsy and inarticulated conversations that we have in real life.

There is more in the film than that, but “Living Reality” starts us in a Dédéy place where four cookie friends, white friends joke on the dates they take place while plotting insipid hijinks in the hope of binding twins. The only person in the room that says nothing is Phil (director Thompson). Phil tries to speak for real, but his speech and his manners seem foreign to the other four stars of the series, who only know the language of a sitcom in one season. Phil has no choice but to apologize and go home.

We leave the limits of the sitcom and go with him in his dilapidated studio, where no laugh is heard. He turns on his television and falls asleep while watching an apparently random collection of videos at home, featuring people in more intimate and authentic moments of their lives. Philip does not exist in any of these videos, but he probably aspires to be, instead of being trapped in a purgatorial existence fed by the canned laughter.

Many will read a lot of racial connotations in the room, because Phil is the only person of color in the sitcom. There are many ways to look at this, but Thompson never does everything possible to underline this aspect of the room or to attract attention. Even the final line of the film has several meanings, but Thompson is intelligent to leave the style – all styles, in fact – to itself. We are moving away from the film wanting to watch it again, rather than feeling as if we have been given an obvious message nourished with the spoon.

“Living Reality” turned out to be a much more popular film than I imagined it would be when I programmed it at the Chicago Critics Film Festival last spring. He did not win the public prize, but he has received many votes as a public favorite, mainly viewers in their twenties. The film has a lot to say about the insulating feeling of being constantly bombed with different types of media that are trying to dictate the behavior of people. We all grew up with it to a certain extent, but Thompson’s film reflects a contemporary landscape that will feel different for each spectator who looks at him.

You can watch “Living Reality” here on Nobudge.

Q&R with the director and star Philip Thompson

How was this idea born?

I am always fascinated by the way films and television have such an influence on our society, often in a way in which we do not always know. Original vanity came from this image that I had television characters that watched us on television and being directly influenced by our real world, and my mind started to run on the way in which it would be reflected in their fictitious and sadly sorted world. From there, I started to build more personal diapers in the idea, by drawing from my own life as a black years in New York. I was interested in the disconnection between the idealized version of the life that we see on television and the reality in which I live, what I feel is much more depressing and uncertain.

I have always loved the Diptych narration because it obliges the public to make a critical commitment with the subjects they observe, allowing them to compare and contrast two opposite stories and arrive at their own conclusions. So, the idea of ​​juxtaposing a familiar sitcom format with something more raw and not scripted was really exciting, both stylistically and emotionally. I am attracted by the shock of tones and aesthetics, especially since my main visual inspirations range from classic sitcoms in the early 2010 Mumbecore and the Dogme 95 movement. It was like a chance to combine everything I love in one film, and once everything clicked, we decided to go.

The elements of the sitcom you have proposed seem very real and familiar. Even the VHS style is fair, which is difficult to do well. Was it difficult to determine at the technical level?

The recreation of a sitcom has certainly come with its own challenges. But also that we had such a clear plan, it also facilitated the task in many ways. The writing of the sitcom was simple, because the beats and the structure are so anchored of all the shows that I grew up. We mainly recreated what I liked the most since I was a child. The most difficult part to reproduce the sitcom was to find the right laugh for each joke. You might think that it is as simple as pressing a “laughter” button, but instead, you have to find the right laugh to sell each joke. We spent a ridiculous time painting through libraries of laughter and watching the same scenes again and again with different laughs just to get the right one. This is what has slowed down the publishing process the most.

Regarding the VHS look, it was really a question of putting the film on a VHS strip, then of writing it and making sure that it had the right level of “follow -up”. This gave him the texture and degradation that give the impression that something you will find on an old band download on YouTube. I suppose that for me, the whole thing is to try to imitate very specific memories, to capture this feeling of looking at something that you liked a long time ago, exactly as you remember.

It’s probably quite obvious, but what real sitcom (s) inspired the sitcom of your film?

“Friends” and “How I Met Your Mother” were great inspirations, or really any show that captured this dreamy and idealized version of being twenty years in New York. This kind of sitcoms shaped what I thought my adult life was going to look like. They created this fantasy in which I wanted to grow.

However, in terms of real humor, it definitely comes from the programs that I grew up watching as a child, like “Drake & Josh” or “Hannah Montana”. I was trying to channel this energy from the sitcom from the 90s and 2,000, this specific rhythm and tone that made me completely stuck on the screen. The goal was to recreate the kind of television that made me feel that I was not alone, that I had friends and that I made a real human connection.

When the film makes this transition to reality, how did you understand what to explore there? Everything seems spontaneous and / or improvised, and a little random. How has your realization approach changed for these scenes?

In the original draft of the script, I wanted the “Real Life” section of the film to reflect something like “How to With John Wilson”, where we simply capture the banality of human existence from afar. However, after having filmed and modified the entire section of the sitcom, we took a step back and realized that many conversations in these first scenes were centered on meetings, relations and navigation in the twenties in New York. For this reason, we decided to make the scenes more specifically surrounding people in their twenties in New York, capturing subjects of intimacy, friendships and the beautiful Mundanity of the way life feels at this age.

Regarding the offset, the discrepancy between the two sections was dramatic. The SitCom part was strongly built: we had a built set, a locked script, a rigid blockage and several repetitions. Everything was designed to feel polite and “played”. But for the “Real Life” section, we wanted the complete opposite: we wanted him to feel believed, disorderly and lived.

We have thrown a lot of non-actors for these scenes, mainly friends who really live in Brooklyn. I tried to shape the scenes around their real experiences, and each time I gave them something scripted, it was always too rigid. He never landed as naturally as when they talked in their own words, improvised or existed in front of the camera. This relaxation gave the film an authenticity that we could not simulate, and it created an intentional contrast that is really marked with the built world of the sitcom.

Your character is resigned to this unsatisfactory and shallow world of the sitcom. How does this resignation resonate with you? Did this feel the catalyst for this project in one way or another?

I think this feeling is what most of us feel to live in the real world. In fact, I may not speak for everyone. This is how I You felt to live in the real world. I do not always understand his rules or how people behave. What to do and what not to do. But I know that I must comply to be considered a healthy member of human society. If you don’t sit down, they call you crazy. And if you can’t beat them, join them. So, I guess it is one of the most personal parts of the film, I don’t really know how to integrate or even behave like an ordinary human being, so I act like the other people around me. Single see, monkey of. This seems to have worked so far.

Originally, I finished the film with Théo, which drops just in a nothingness hike. But Theo trying to open, only to be rejected by his distribution comrades and artificiality rebel against sincerity, made a more convincing end. So no, it was not the catalyst. But just a way to finish it with a little more period as opposed to an ellipse.

People also always ask me why the end feels so unsatisfactory, almost as if they expected Théo unleashed and tells everyone, or killing them all or something. But that’s not how most people behave. Theo will continue to continue with his sad life, just trying to integrate with the other people around him, and finding only comfort in his television at home when he rots in bed. It is the most relatable and human way to finish I think. It’s just the way things are happening. Maybe other people can refer.

What is the next step for you?

Right now, I’m focusing on long work. I am currently in pre-production on a functionality and by writing another which will also be developed. The two projects are thematic online with Living reality: They explore television, the power of the images we consume and how these images shape our understanding of the world. More specifically, they both treat the way in which the breed is perceived through the objective of the popular American media. So, in a way, I continue to unpack the same questions, just on a larger and more diaper scale.