September 8: The link above leads to the homepage for the American film criticism magazine Cineaste, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. This special issue’s articles include my review of The Lovers, a beautiful new romantic comedy that shows how the members of a suburban upper-middle-class American couple (played by Debra Winger and Tracy Letts) find their plans to take up residence with adulterous partners thrown into confusion by their falling into passion once more with each other.
The Lovers is a sad and wonderful film that continually finds ways to grow outwards what could easily be a flat scenario. In the review, I discuss how the film gives clichéd situations and settings new life through careful and delicate attention to detail in a way that echoes the internal revivals experienced by the characters, who together form a walking lexicon of ordinariness that blossoms into strangeness over time.
The careful depiction of this transformation process - occasioned by an entity glimpsed throughout the film, no less than love itself - is to be expected from Azazel Jacobs, the writer-director of The Lovers. Jacobs’s first feature, Nobody Needs to Know, is an intriguing piece of experimental fiction that takes place during a film shoot and asks how closely and well cinema can depict peoples’ inner lives. His four remarkable follow-up features - The GoodTimesKid, Momma’s Man, Terri, and The Lovers - all act seemingly in response.
These films take on the task of seeing and hearing how far indelibly, even disturbingly, lonely people will go beyond themselves to connect with each other. The ways in which these incomplete people strive to complete themselves through gathering around shared points of interest inevitably gain weight as metaphors for spectators’ relations to art. The Lovers is certainly a film that serves to help its viewers feel less lonely. Speaking just for myself - and hopefully without giving too much away - the film’s unexpectedly happy ending left me feeling the happiest I’ve felt after seeing a new film in some time.
The Cineaste review of The Lovers is print-only, so I urge readers of this post to buy a copy of the issue and help keep this important magazine afloat. As research for the piece, I interviewed Jacobs by e-mail about his work on his film, and an edited version of our exchange appears below.
How do you direct chemistry, and how do you think that you were able to create chemistry between the lead actors in The Lovers?
Azazel Jacobs: I’ve heard Tracy Letts say that creating chemistry is part of an actor’s job, and I think he’s right. As a director, I try to help with the selection of the crew, specifically through finding like-minded people with whom actors will be up to risk things, and to be vulnerable and open. Also, in general, actors are at the strongest vantage point of anyone to see through bluffing, and in my experience, it’s worked out best to just admit to them when I don’t have a good answer to a problem and try to sort out the solution together with them, which forces at least a sort of honest chemistry. I find it hard to ask actors to be truthful without being so myself. In terms of The Lovers, that synchronicity was created completely by Debra Winger and by Tracy – it truly was there from their first moment onwards, and it didn’t ask for much directing, only awareness of what was going on.
To what extent do you storyboard or shot-plan scenes? What impact does this extent have on your work with technicians and actors?
Jacobs: My cinematographer Tobias Datum and I make a shot list when I think that a movie may happen, but before it’s a sure thing, and definitely before we have actual locations. There are a few images I have in my mind when I am writing – kind of destination points I try to hit – which we then use just to get into the conversation: Mikey with shaving cream in Momma’s Man, Terri in the bath tub in Terri, Michael and Mary with wine in The Lovers. Since we are close friends and we meet up pretty regularly, there has also been a continuing conversation about things that we find to be currently inspiring and that we hope to bring into whatever we approach next.
Shot listing without locations focuses a conversation on what is happening emotionally and leads us to sketch ways to depict it. It also means that none of what we do is precious and that all of it is easy to put away in production for the sake of letting actors and locations lead the way while still having the fundamental goals already established.
What interests you most about the home and office spaces in The Lovers? What do you believe that they reveal about the characters, and the characters about them?
Jacobs: The films most inspiring to The Lovers were the members of Roy Andersson’s “Living trilogy”, along with Cassavetes’s Opening Night, Bergman’s Dreams, and Allen’s Interiors. What was directly inspired by these films was their usage of space as narrative. In these films, plot passes through the space surrounding the human characters, and the space itself goes through the biggest transformation of any character from start to finish.
I aim for finding a location’s ability to inform depth and flatness, both physically and psychologically. It’s getting into the space with a crew and a camera and watching actors enter and find their way that finally erases the way I’ve been picturing the space (for sometimes way too long) and that allows the film to live.
Some of my favorite location details in The Lovers involve the home’s way of reminding me of the set of a home onstage in Opening Night. The bannister and the camera’s manner of capturing Mary’s walk down it recall to me Norma Desmond’s walk from Sunset Boulevard. Lucy’s home was built in 1929 and was due to be destroyed after we wrapped, and production designer Susan Tebbut and her crew brought out its spirit (as well as Lucy’s) for posterity. These are just a few of the things that quickly come to my mind. I wanted The Lovers to exist in a place of comfort, leading to the idea that some of that comfort has created the film’s situation.
I also think of costumes as locations – what shells do these characters exist in? The very first conversation that I have when planning a film, the conversation that first begins to make the film and people in it begin to feel real, is my wife Diaz, who designs the costumes. She is the first person to read a script, so naturally we talk about how the people look, a discussion that leads into describing their world.
Mandy Hoffman’s score is crucial to The Lovers. How did you and she conceive the score in tandem with the rest of the film’s creation?
Jacobs: I wrote and shot with no other music in mind other than the song that is physically played in the story. I asked Mandy to expand that one song from its practical beginnings into something that grows dramatically. I showed her a semi-rough cut of the scene without any other footage, nor did I share the script with her. The music that she created for the film brought forth roots in old Hollywood and Western European movies from her own instincts. I surely saw the influence of some of those films while writing the screenplay – the film’s premise alone is so Depression-era screwball – and her gravitating to that influence was a testament (to me) that it still existed in the footage. Previously, we had shied away from anything that could be even remotely conceived as manipulative, but here was a clash, a contrast between image and sound that felt like it communicated how people were feeling without telling the audience how to feel.
Excited by this development, editor Darrin Navarro and I brought on music consultant Daniel Schweiger and music editor Brett Pierce and, along with our music supervisor Dan Wilcox, we temped out the rest of the rough cut that we had at that moment with period-era music. I’ve never temped music before, and it wasn’t so much to help Mandy, but more to make me more comfortable with the idea of using a score, since the choice felt radical and I wanted to be convinced. A lot of Paul Misraki and Georges Delerue, along with some Francis Lai, was placed throughout the film. I showed this cut to Diaz and then, after feeling secure, to the producers Ben LeClaire and Chris Stinson, and then, ultimately, to A24.
I doubt that Mandy used this temp score for much more than accelerating our conversation – for example, determining when we liked the music to contrast or sync up with the story. Since piano is a character in The Lovers, we took it out of the score, despite it having always been our base instrument in the past. This move left the floor open for both of us, and Mandy began sending me her home studio versions of the score that were expansive, particular, and so inspired.
To do this score correctly, ultimately with a real orchestra, was an unforeseen and relatively big expense. Probably close to a tenth of the film’s total budget was spent on something that none of us could truly say would work until it was done. But the music she wrote instilled a confidence in us all, it and it offered a chance to make something that I personally hadn’t encountered before.
How do the screenwriter Azazel Jacobs and the director Azazel Jacobs work together?
Jacobs: I wrote The Lovers with one person in mind – a teacher, mentor, friend, and collaborator named Gill Dennis who suddenly died a few months before I started the script. The writing felt like a way of continuing a conversation that had been interrupted. He was a real lover and a fighter with a great laugh that I could hear while writing. He was someone who was profoundly moved by the drama in life, the things we do to each other, amazing and horrible, and the relationships, bubbles, and experiences that we can find ourselves inside or outside. I wrote The Lovers with him in mind and then tried to forget when I was directing in order to see what actually emerged, let others who helped make the film tell their stories within it. In the end, I still felt like the film was for Gill.
Your father Ken Jacobs is a very great filmmaker. What do you believe that you have learned from him that has been most important to your own filmmaking?
Jacobs: I hope too many things to list. I can easily see similar fascinations with time and space, continuous loops, dress-up, make-believe, celebration, and despair. I distinctly remember being a little kid and him giving me advice that I use every day while making films. My dad told me to sit on his knees and then said that he was going to teach me some magic words to give me strength that I could use whenever I wanted. All I had to do was to repeat them three times. The words were, “Fuck it.”
In The Lovers, Michael says it once, Mary says it the second time…
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