Share | movie | 2019 | Official Featurette
After discovering a disturbing video from a night she doesn’t remember, sixteen-year-old Mandy must try to figure out | dG1fQjJIMVpmRmhaQ3M
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 - Hi AFI Movie Club, I'm Pippa Bianco
00:02 and I'm the writer and director of Cher
00:04 and an AFI DWW alumna.
00:06 - And I'm Eva Burkowski, I am the cinematographer of Cher
00:11 and I am an AFI conservatory alum.
00:14 - I just woke up on my lawn.
00:17 - Outside?
00:18 You woke up outside?
00:25 (car engine roaring)
00:28 - One of the things we thought a lot about
00:42 was how do you visualize the state of trying to remember?
00:46 'Cause I think what she wants above all things
00:48 is to know what happened.
00:49 I think it's much easier to structure a story
00:51 around someone who's obviously active, a perpetrator,
00:54 than it is to structure a story around the person
00:57 to whom something happened.
00:58 A creative mission statement was sort of
01:00 how can I as a writer and as a director
01:02 find what is active in what people actually do
01:05 in these situations without imposing a device,
01:08 like a detective or an Avenger or a White Knight
01:11 or a revenge plot to artificially activate
01:14 Mandy as a protagonist.
01:16 How can I do the work to observe what is very active
01:19 in what real people do
01:20 and that we tend to dismiss as passive?
01:22 So many of our references were these 70s
01:25 sort of like heavy, dark films,
01:28 shimmery neon in puddles to cloud.
01:32 - Even prison movies like "Stardup,"
01:34 she's increasingly isolated and weighted down
01:37 by how other people in her life
01:40 or other bureaucratic systems
01:41 are spiraling out of her control.
01:44 And so that the visual language would be that.
01:46 Of these sorts of like really dark thrillers
01:48 where it's like, what's around the next corner?
01:50 Am I gonna lose my life?
01:51 Those are the stakes, you know,
01:53 for her psychologically and emotionally.
01:55 - We never had to talk about it
01:57 'cause there was an implicit understanding
01:59 between us of what it means
02:00 to lose control of your own narrative
02:02 as a young person, as a woman in this world.
02:05 - One of the things we talked about a lot
02:08 was why "Anamorphic," if we also wanna be 16/9,
02:12 which was, I think, like part of it was like wanting
02:14 one, like sort of the intimacy of a smaller frame,
02:16 but also for it to be like digitally native,
02:19 for it to be the kind of film
02:20 that would be more exciting to watch on a phone
02:24 in which like the digital medium would not be,
02:27 you know, a hindrance in any way,
02:28 but you would be making the most
02:29 of all the things that are cool
02:31 about being able to watch a story in your hand
02:33 or with headphones on.
02:34 That format was important just for that reason.
02:36 And then the anamorphic lenses in that format,
02:38 it was like, yes, strange to crop,
02:40 but that I think we loved the compression of space
02:43 and the kind of weirdness
02:44 that you got in the cropped anamorphic.
02:46 - Yeah, it's like if you want a claustrophobic feeling,
02:50 chop off a third and a third.
02:52 And the way that "Anamorphic" renders things
02:55 that are close and things that are far,
02:57 and those lenses created an extra layer of intentionality
03:00 because it was about a commitment to creating an image
03:04 that was this size and working against
03:06 the old school technology to make something that,
03:08 you know, commented on new technology.
03:11 It was a process.
03:12 - I'd been working as a writer's assistant for a long time,
03:15 and I knew I wanted to make a feature.
03:16 And it was like, well, how do people do that?
03:18 How do you like convince someone to give you a million
03:21 or millions of dollars?
03:23 And a lot of the filmmakers I loved,
03:24 especially at that time who were like, you know,
03:26 maybe a couple of years ahead,
03:27 that's a proof of concept of sort of what people were doing,
03:29 a short in order to make a feature.
03:31 And so that's what I applied to DWW with this idea.
03:34 It changed dramatically, I think, from making the short
03:37 through the process of showing the short at festivals
03:40 and then writing the feature and then making the feature.
03:42 It's a completely different film.
03:44 And I think I'm a completely different filmmaker
03:46 probably than when I started, but yeah,
03:48 that was the intention was to get to reunite again,
03:51 to make the longer version.
03:53 - It was one of those projects where you bring your heart
03:54 and soul to the table and that's,
03:57 and it just was so raw and honest in that way.
04:00 - This movie would not exist without AFI, truly.
04:03 So thank you.