At Saturday night's awards show, I was surprised and flattered to hear the film's title announced as the winner in the fest's "Best Experimental Work" category. As I went up to accept the award (with writer/producer/star Reid Taylor), I wondered "what was experimental about it?"
The truth is, the answer is fairly obvious. The film was shot in both black-and-white and in "Academy ratio" - the nearly-square aspect ratio seen most commonly in early Hollywood and on TV until TVs got wide in the mid-'00s.
What struck me, though, is that this wasn't an experiment so much as a willingness to use the tools in the toolbox, even though they're not as commonly used these days (there have been several notable black-and-white films recently, including "Nebraska" and "Ida", but only one recent film that I know of made use of Academy ratio, and that is "The Artist" ("The Grand Budapest Hotel" used the ratio intermittently.)
For us these aesthetic choices were determined by the needs of the story (whereas most "experimental" work is about the experiment). The film is black and white to serve the melodramatic tone of the narrative. The black-and-white makes the whole story feel more Noir, and gives permission for the drama to be a little over-the-top. It ties the film to a specific cinematic tradition.
As for the aspect ratio, this was also a purely narrative choice. The film takes place almost entirely in a house - a house that becomes increasingly confining as the story unfolds. To tell a story about a guy who's literally and figuratively boxing himself in, trapping himself in his own paranoia (represented visually by the house itself), I needed a narrower frame. The wider images that have become traditional these days simply wouldn't have given me the opportunity to put my character in that box.
So, to my mind, there was no experiment here. I had a story to tell, and these were the tools I needed in order to tell it. But then, there's the important recognition that the film is also a product, an item made to be sold to distributors, consumed by the public. There is still (despite Oscars for "The Artist" and nominations for other films) a sense that black-and-white doesn't sell. And for people with widescreen TVs, the black bars that surround an Academy ratio image are off-putting (and I remember when letterboxing used to irritate people - the black bars above and below a widescreen movie image when it's shrunk to fit those old square-ish TVs). These considerations made the aesthetic decision gutsy.
In fact, we were so nervous about presenting our film the way we initially envisioned it, that we initially cropped it down to a 1:85 (wider than modern TVs) aspect ratio, and had the footage color-corrected. We screened the color/widescreen version in February, and for a short while, that was the only version of the movie that existed. Truth be told, we liked it, and were willing to leave the original vision behind us. I credit Scott Baker, our cinematographer, for taking the initiative and putting together a version of the film the way we originally intended it, just to see what it looked like, to see if it could also work. On his own time, Scott made the footage black-and-white, cropped it down to Academy ratio, adjusted the framing shot-by-shot, and sent it to us. Reid and I were delighted with it, of course, and it became the primary version that Reid submitted to festivals. It's the version Laughlin received, and the rest (as they say) is history.
The nice thing about this, of course, is that now we've got both versions available: Black-and-white and Academy ratio for those who want it, color and widescreen for everyone else.
At the end of the day, I'm very proud of our award at Laughlin. For me, it validates the creative decision to use those old-fashioned tools. It validates Scott's insistence that we give our original vision a chance. And it validates Reid's gutsy move of bringing such an unusual-looking film out to the world. But in my mind, it still wasn't an experiment. It was just storytelling.
-Arnon
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