The Ross Brothers
BY
Nick Pinkerton and Sean Price Williams
An interview with the filmmaker brothers Bill and Turner.
Gasoline Rainbow plays at Metrograph on Monday, May 6.
Prior to this Zoom interview, I’d last set eyes on Bill and Turner, the two-headed filmmaking entity generally referred to The Ross Brothers, in, of all places, Valladolid, Spain. They were there to show their latest feature, Gasoline Rainbow (2023); I was at the same festival with a movie I’d written the screenplay for, The Sweet East (2023), along with the film’s director and cinematographer, my co-interviewer here, Sean Price Williams. Sean and I have both known the Ross boys for years, and we spent a good chunk of our free time hanging out together. They caught up with our movie and we caught up with theirs, and all of us were tickled at the parallels between them; we—all of us middle-aged guys—had happened to make movies about Gen Z teenagers leaving home, striking off on their own into the unknown.
The principals in Gasoline Rainbow—Tony Abuerto, Micah Bunch, Nichole Dukes, Nathaly Garcia, Makai Garza—have spent their short lives in small-town Oregon; as the movie opens the group of long-time friends, fresh from high school graduation, pack into a beat-up van of dubious reliability and set out to see the Pacific coast, 500 miles to the west. The kids are called by their own names in the movie, and the encounters they have on their journey, which involves jumping trains, wandering into bonfire beer busts, and cruising waterways in the precincts of Portland in search of a mythic rager, have the vivacious spontaneity of life as lived in the moment. But in point of fact, there is no Wiley High School in Oregon, and the quintet, first-time actors all, were brought together and sent out on their adventure by the Ross Brothers.
Like previous Ross Brothers features Tchoupitoulas (2012) and Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020), the Ross’s approach in Gasoline Rainbow amounts to what critic Mark Asch has termed “a nonfiction portrait of fictional circumstances.” The framework and the specific incidents that occur during the trip to the shining sea were prepared, but within that framework much was left to chance. The kids and the folks they encounter along their way, nonprofessional actors all, are of course performing, as anyone conscious of having a camera trained on them can be said to be performing, but I would hesitate to call the sense of wonderment they express at their surroundings “faked”—likewise their fits of ditch weed–fueled giggling, the evident affection and mindful protectiveness they show towards one another.
It’s a lovely, generous, inviting, and thrillingly liberated movie, Gasoline Rainbow, but not a naïve one. Its principals arrive at the beach with their faith in the future intact—which is a beautiful thing, yes, but it also might make one somewhat afraid for what might happen to these sweet kids six months, a year, five years down the road, because our realities very often don’t measure up to our expectations, and the romantics and idealists most open to the world are often the most vulnerable to being broken by it. Or maybe not. An authorial aside by Charles Dickens in his Bleak House comes to mind: “It will always happen that these men of the world, who go through it in armour, defend themselves from quite as much good as evil.”
I don’t believe ol’ Boz ever made it down to Valladolid, but the writer Miguel de Cervantes lived there for a time, during the brief period when the Spanish Court had settled in the city; I didn’t get to his former home there, now a museum called Casa de Cervantes, but if I recall rightly, Bill and Turner did. By sheer coincidence, however, during my one night and day in Madrid after the festival, I wound up staying on the block that Cervantes lived and died on, so it wasn’t a total wash. Do I bring this up because persisting in making movies for very little money for audiences that number in the thousands rather than millions, and earning very little money in doing so, is about as quixotic as it gets? Certainly that could account for the popularity of Don Quixote with certain other filmmakers who struggled to keep working outside the strictures of the studio system: George A. Romero, who made his own Quixote in 1981’s Knightriders, or Orson Welles, who shot scraps of his, incomplete at the time of his death, for more than a decade across Mexico and Spain.
For all the setbacks and humiliations encountered in their wanderings, I reckon Quixote and Sancho had a more interesting time than they would’ve hanging around La Mancha, and Welles’s “failure” is certainly a lot more appealing than the “success” of, say, Elon Musk. If you can’t get a fat paycheck out of making movies, you can at least take home the experience of making them. I’ve never set foot on a Ross Brothers shoot, but their movies—even the claustrophobic dive bar lock-in Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets—crackle with a sense of discovery, surprise, and copious happy accidents that can only have come out of festive, convivial, raucous, totally alive productions. It’s doubtful they’ll get rich off these films, but I reckon they’ve banked enough experiences by now to keep them well into old age. I can’t really separate the affection I have for the Ross boys from that which I have for their movies, but in this case, they seem one and the same.—Nick Pinkerton
TURNER ROSS: So, what the hell are we doing?
NICK PINKERTON: Gasoline Rainbow is playing at Metrograph, and I thought since we had such a fun time rippin’ it up with you guys in Spain, we could just keep that conversation going. Maybe you could talk a little about what the initial impetus for your film was—because I know everything really developed a lot via process, which is per usual with you guys. But what took you in this particular direction, even to this region, the state of Oregon?
TR: First of all, how fucking fun was it to be in Valladolid!
Gasoline Rainbow (2024)
BILL ROSS: It just felt so good to have that realization of the longevity of our friendship, and being in such a strange place.
TR: We love you guys, obviously, and we were so impressed with your film.
BR: I swear to God, I think about that movie every few days—something from the film will pop in my head and I’ll be like, “Goddammit, they got that right.”
TR: We’re just so fuckin’ pleased that the two of you pulled that off together after so many years of these kinds of conversations. But maybe that is a good way to tie in: during the pandemic, we were thinking about all of the people that we loved, and especially those relationships that you have when you’re younger, where you’re part of a shared experience and the world seems very wide but very small at the same time. Those childhood memories and feelings, that’s always been an impetus for everything that we do—trying to never lose track of the wonder that we felt and the naivete that was inherent in us as we approached a world we knew nothing about. That moment was shitty for us, but what about for our teenage selves, who desperately wanted to get out of nowhere and find somewhere, and just felt like a cannon without a wick? Like, who are those kids, and how do we find them and spend time with them—and not regurgitate our own lived experience, but see what they’re up to, and learn from them? They’re a different generation, they’re a different group of people, I think they’re altogether better kids than we were—
BR: They’re definitely better kids. I do wonder, if Covid had not happened, if our thought process would have changed. It’s impossible to say.
SEAN PRICE WILLIAMS: I was just going to say, I’m just so happy that I was there with a movie. Otherwise, I would have been so jealous of you guys. Usually, it’s just me as a cameraman for something, tagging along. It was good that we were there celebrating the same kind of accomplishments. I mean, Covid had to happen for us to really get our thing going. You guys are active, generally, but I’m lazy—and Covid was perfect for lazy people. It suited me.
BR: It was a nightmare for me. I can’t sit still, so I didn’t know what to do. I was watching the Criterion Channel—this happened from the second I got up till the moment I passed out drunk from drinking too much—and then just texting him [points at Turner] ideas all throughout the day, just like, “Watch this!” You know, Wild Boys of the Road (1933) or whatever popped on, and I was like, “Ah, T, you gotta see this.
NP: I remember bringing up Wild Boys of the Road to you guys in Spain, and you told me that there had been multiple edits of your film and that something from that film figured in one of the edits. Can you talk about how you cut the movie, which I believe was something you approached differently here?
BR: Well, up until this point, for the first five films—we say this is the sixth film, but really, it’s probably the twelfth…
TR: Bill’s been editing since we were little kids. When we started our careers, his was as an editor; he’s the best editor I know, and he has been our editor throughout, with me offering a verbal component, with rare exceptions—but I’m not a technical guy. But this time, we were so involved each step of the scenario, in equal measure, which is not always the case. We conceived it together, scouted it together, put it together together. And then in the edit room, we were there together the entire time.
SPW: Are some of your films more one of yours than the other? Is there one where maybe one of your hearts was in it a little more?
BR: For sure. Someone will bring up an idea and we’ll go down that path; it’s obviously a non-starter if the other person is not into it, too. A movie like Western (2015), though, I don’t know that I would have started out on that trek if T hadn’t been really passionate about the idea. But then I started doing research and thinking on it, and I was like, “Okay, I see what you mean. I’m on board, let’s go do that.”
TR: One fits in where the other sort of leaves off. But this film was really interesting in that it was almost entirely binary, and at the end of it, we all—our assistant editor, Thomas [McGovern] as well—combed through the entirety of the footage individually, and the audio, logged all our notes, met, had initial conversations, and then embarked on three months of independent editing.
BR: I did my usual assembly, Turner did a video-only cut, and Tom did an audio-only cut, which is like an audiobook version of the film.
TR: Then we got together and watched them, and each version was so informative, because each one of them told us what we didn’t need and what was essential about itself. Then we got back together and started collectively editing with all the knowledge that each of us had; we sat in a room for a year and a half, and everybody knew all the pieces—
BR: In the previous films, I’m the only one who knew exactly what we had… It’s a terrifying knowledge to have, you don’t sleep. You’re like, “If that shot doesn’t go in, I’m the only one that doesn’t know that it’s not in there”; “Could this be better?” On your weaker days, you think absolutely it could be better, and you long to have somebody else in the room to talk to… but usually we can’t afford to have that luxury.
TR: Also, in the past the division of our work has been different. A lot of times I spent more time on the front end of the thing, and then Bill would go into his own world on the back end.
BR: This time, everybody knew this stuff inside out, and it made for a lively conversation around the room. There wasn’t that terror that there were other, better possibilities out there.
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020)
SPW: It’s funny, because when our dear friend Robert Greene is editing something that I’ve shot, I can seem to know the footage better than he does. I’ve been the one to say, “Hey, Robert, we covered that scene. We’ve got another angle.” And he says, “No, you don’t.” I said, “Yeah, we do, go back.”
BR: I’ve often noticed that as well when we shoot for other people. It’s like, “Have you tried this option?” They’re like, “No, no, there’s no other option.” It’s like, “Now hold on! There are options here.” So, I don’t know. If you’re doing your job right, which it sounds like our dear friend Robert doesn’t—
NP: Come on, Robert’s got enough problems already. He doesn’t need this splashed all over the internet.
BR: Well, I’ll leave that to your editorial.
TR: Hold on, hold on.
BR: Oh, there’s a note being passed. [A blue piece of paper is slid under the door]
TR: We just received this under the door. It says, “Listening to you guys talk about your work ethic is great. I’ve been listening from under the door—Dorothy.”
NP: Did your mommy put that note there?
TR: No, it’s my daughter, Dorothy. “I love you, Dorothy.”
SPW: I bring Robert up not to just throw him under the bus but because we were all developing our ideas about documentary together. I do think Robert’s a great editor, and I was always really happy knowing he would edit something; I knew that he would know what I was doing, psychologically, what my decisions were when I’m shooting. I really miss those days. I miss seeing you guys all the time in places. I feel like I’ve been banished from the documentary club, but that’s because I won’t come out to Long Island City when you guys are in town.
[The brothers laugh]
TR: We would love to get together again in the future.
SPW: But I do really miss those days. seeing you guys all the time in places, and us really developing some things together. I mean, you guys are on another whole level of hybrid or whatever—maybe that sounds diminutive or something, what’s the word I’m looking for? “Hybrid,” that sounds so 2010. But it’s still what you guys are doing, right? There’s got to be a better word for it now.
BR: What do you think Kent Mackenzie called it back in the day? I’m sure that’s not how he was referring to it.
SPW: They all have different phrases—“actuality dramas,” things like that.
NP: It’s interesting, because that language was bandied about quite a bit around 2010, but really that’s just what documentary was in its origins. It’s like Man of Aran (1934), where Flaherty’s going to some obscure Scottish island where they haven’t done this particular kind of whale hunting in decades and creating this simulacra, for good or ill, of the hunt as if they’re still doing it. You brought up Mackenzie; there’s also Rogosin’s On the Bowery (1956)—that kind of subterfuge is baked into so much of the documentary tradition. The “fly-on-the-wall” vérité filmmakers maybe tried to veer away from that, or to make their interventions less obvious, but the hybrid represents an older tradition than direct cinema, vérité, whatever.
TR: It’s the more exciting way to work. I mean, we’ve been involved in that conversation, but the reality is this is just the way and the means by which we’ve been working and can work, and it’s kept it alive and very visceral and present for us over these years. We have done these things together, and/or with very few people who really believe in a shared vision of things, and it’s alive in front of and behind the camera at every phase of the journey, and I really wouldn’t want to work any other way.
SPW: The worst part about it must be the Q&As when people are demanding to know what was faked and how you did this or that. I mean, I had this temptation to ask you about the train-hopping scene—but I’m not asking you about that right now. I would never.
TR: It’s fun. I mean, especially if it’s an audience member, somebody who wants to know this kind of stuff, that’s cool, man. Getting locked into the same conversation is another thing—and for us, I’m excited to get moving forward into a new conversation between each other and amongst our peers. It’s exciting, right? So where do you go from here? We got excited by watching watching your guys’ film.
BR: It was the most alive film I’d seen in a long time.
SPW: Thanks for saying that. I’m feeling pretty insecure. I just watched the new Harmony Korine music video that came out [Bladee’s “ONE SECOND (ft. Yung Lean)”], and I… I just feel so irrelevant already. “Oh, I’m going to take a 16mm camera and…”—what the hell am I even doing with a 16mm camera anymore? That’s so boring and old.
BR: Is he doing the infrared thing? I haven’t seen it.
SPW: I can’t even tell you what the hell’s going on in the music video. But the infrared movie [AGGRO DR1FT, 2023] was great, it was cool. He’s moving forward. I don’t know where he’s figuring all this stuff out, or what kind of team he’s got, but it’s impressive and intimidating. We’ve got to keep on our feet, we’ve got to stay relevant.
TR: We’ve got to—and to stick to our guns. There is a thing that we do and we’ll continue to do it better. We appreciate Harmony. Like, keep smashing the windows, you know?
Gasoline Rainbow (2024)
SPW: Yeah, I think it’s important that he keeps trying, right? This was going to be the last question, but we’re kind of talking about it: what’s in the future for you guys? Are you going to break up like all the other brothers do? And one of you is going to do lesbian comedies?
NP: One of you is going to pop up acting in a straight-to-Disney+ Star Wars series.
BR: Well, he was in a cowboy show this year [gesturing to Turner].
TR: Well, we both have to do our side hustles.
SPW: So it’s begun.
NP: Oh yeah, you were in [the TV series] Yellowstone, right?
TR: Typecasting—I ran a saloon. [Laughs] I did alright. But no, we’re sticking together.
BR: We’re not going to break up. [Laughs] But whenever something like that happens, as brothers, we’re always like, ‘Aw, shit.’
TR: We’re sticking together because we enjoy each other’s company. And this is a shared language and something we’ve built, and it’s challenging, but it’s made our lives so much better.
BR: It’s very fun. We check in with each other before every movie, like, “Do you want to do this again?” I like working with other people, but I get no bigger enjoyment than working with T here.
TR: Why in the world wouldn’t we? But also, what we do is not ego-driven.
BR: Well, certainly, there’s some ego involved.
TR: I mean, we have a fucking brand that we’ve built, obviously, but the essence of the work is letting go. The essence is composing something, creating scenarios in which people can inhabit those spaces and be the authors of their own experience. That’s pretty rad. I don’t know where that goes from here. We’re working on something new that I’m excited about it—I don’t think it deviates from where we’ve been going but it furthers that… It’s a little scary, because we fled this systematic way of making movies as young guys, working on bigger sets in the world of Hollywood the way you’re supposed to, in order to make these fucking scrappy, handmade movies. Today is actually the birthday of us as filmmakers. We are 17 years old. 17 years ago, I strapped a camera to the back of my motorcycle in Los Angeles and drove to Ohio to start shooting our first movie. It was a break from the system because we were both supposed to join unions in LA and do this thing. Two years later, we had a movie that people actually responded to [2009’s 45365], and we’re meeting you guys, and we’ve never stopped working… We did some real bootstraps shit—and it’s still scrappy—but at the moment we’re working with people who have believed in us enough to keep making the scrappy shit. Nobody’s given us a call yet about a Marvel movie, that’d be very curious, but I don’t think that’s where we’re best used. Every day we have these conversations, I think back to sitting around a table with you, Sean, when we were kids starting out in this shit, and you passed us this napkin—what was it that it said? “We’re poets and we’ll die unrecognized.” It deeply resonated in the moment, and I wish to fulfill that.
NP: Do you still have the napkin?
BR: Oh yeah, still.
TR: Absofuckinglutely.
SPW: Not to go down this path too much, but I think, our films are both films that could not be made in the union mold. For us, that’s even part of the inspiration, knowing that we’re doing something that people with more millions of dollars actually couldn’t do. I think that’s really important: to work with our budgets and realities and crews, and do something that could not happen any other way—which is a challenge—
TR: But I love the challenge. You know, I appreciate that there are a lot of people employed in the industry by unions. This is something that we believe in as a creative endeavor, as art, though, and it scares me a little. Because what happens, then, with the control of those spaces? Because we have been so loose… What if there were strictures on it? What if there were rules and time schedules, and all the baggage of that?
BR: If it did, it would feel like high school, and I would want nothing to do with it.
NP: Turner, you said something earlier about creating scenarios and letting a thing have a life of its own. It occurred to me when you were talking about going back to Ohio for 45365 that a lot of the films, Western too, have scenarios that are rooted in a place first and foremost. I understand your relationship with New Orleans, I understand your relationship with Southwestern Ohio—but how did you start having this relationship with the Pacific Northwest specifically, and how did that announce itself as the backdrop for this project?
TR: Bill and I together had spent enough time up there that I could use it as a frame of reference for conversation. But I had been up there hitchhiking, hoppin’ trains, on the road, a lot—through Washington state, down the Oregon coast. A lot of that is pretty first-hand inspiration, and I love those landscapes. But then two things. One: there was so much more to discover. The other: it felt deeply resonant with something we understood from our childhood. There are so many small towns that stand outside of the perceived paradigm of [a place, ie.] the bigger cities and the culture at large. Portland does not represent the entire state of Oregon. Oregon is not all Democratic and urban and liberal, nor is it all forested. All of the movie—all of the crazy landscapes in it—exists in that box that is Oregon. We wanted a landscape that could mirror an emotional landscape. We wanted to have kids who come from those small spaces that we understood and who have one of those marquee spaces out there, like a Portland, and they still don’t know what it is.
BR: And also, it’s a place that we had never made anything in.
TR: We hadn’t made anything there, but there was so much love for that the place. Think about Stand by Me (1986), The Goonies (1985), My Own Private Idaho (1991)—these films that are etched in our collective consciousness, nostalgic cinema. Those are shot there, that backdrop is familiar and deeply resonant even if you haven’t been there. Also, we played the fucking Oregon Trail video game on the first computer we ever worked on, we read about [the explorers] Lewis and Clark excessively for a certain period of time… westward migration, Manifest Destiny, grunge music in the ’90s… The Northwest is an idea. The poster for the movie [Gasoline Rainbow] is of the kids sitting on a van on a long road to nowhere. They’re in the exact spot that opens and closes My Own Private Idaho.
SPW: That’s what I think of—it’s all Goonies and Gus Van Sant to me. I’ve never been there. And the suicide tradition, I guess.
TR: Incredible part of the country.
NP: One of the things I remember you saying is that you’d started out wanting to do something that was maybe a little grimier, or a little grimmer, that was drawing on experiences you guys had had when you were the age of the characters in the film—and that that was kind of modified once you were really with these kids, that you didn’t want to impress your idea of what being a teenager is onto them…
TR: We keep trying to make a grimy movie.
BR: I want to make Pixote (1980) or Streetwise (1984) or Over the Edge (1979). I mean, by the time we were 18, we’d been arrested several times—
TR: We were shitty kids, but it was also a different collective era. My easiest takeaway with this question is just if we saw somebody different when we were kids, we would say, “Fuck you.” These kids see somebody different and they say, “Fuck, yeah.”
BR: They’re like, “What are you all about? What’s this all about that you’re up to here? Let’s talk about it.” There’s this warmth and curiosity that is just undeniable—and thank God that we have ended up in a place where we’re now very curious, and very warm, and so we really bonded over that.
SPW: I mean, you’re hopeful guys, you’re optimistic. I think you’re probably attracted to those people even more by them being open-minded. You’re not going to make that grimy movie yet.
TR: We keep trying but somehow it keeps ending up hopeful and optimistic.
NP: At the same time, I think it’s a mistake to say the movie is merely this bright-eyed, wonderstruck approach to the world, because the darkness is there, on the edges. As lovely as the kids are, and as infectious as that spirit of discovery is, it’s not just a simple, “Gee whiz, ain’t the world grand” thing.
TR: There’s always a darkness on the edge of town—I think that is a recurring motif for us. We can be joyful in these spaces, we can connect, but we are all bringing something individually too, and encountering something collectively that… yeah, it’s not all put together, it’s not all hunky dory, like you say—but I like it that way. It’s like, you can choose to be let in, and those moments are sacred. And there are some sacred moments in the film. But we got to meet each other on our own terms in the common space.
NP: What are some sacred moments, to your minds?
BR: In the film or while making it?
NP: Both? Ideally, I think, probably one becomes the other, especially in your way of making films.
TR: With each of the kids, because they were first-time actors, we were trying to create conditions that would allow them to draw something out of themselves and express themselves, to find a unique alchemy for each of them, that might bring out things they wish to say that they never do. Some of those kids are going through some serious shit and, at the very least, each of them is trying to find themselves. And each kind of has a moment—either a moment of admission or a moment of seeing themselves, or a letting go of something, like Nathaly in the bar, Micah with his uncle, Makai at the end of the film, talking to another kid about how incredible it is to actually be with people that are like you. Some might just seem like teenage epiphanies, but that’s a big fucking deal.
BR: That’s huge. I mean, I didn’t have that feeling until, swear to God, it wasn’t until Full Frame in 2009, when I met you, Sean, and I met Robert. All of a sudden the world opened up. I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s people like me! You’ve watched a Frederick Wiseman film! Wow!
TR: We were some basic kids, you know. I think [the kids in the film] are ciphers for all of our experiences, but they came from a place that was deeply resonant for us, in their own, unique way, and so I think we can hold them with loving empathy, and also try to conjure spaces in which maybe they can get at some of those truths a little faster than we did.
BR: We cast the kids because they’re the type of kids who would take a trip like this, be unruly enough to just pick up and go and say, ”Fuck it.” One night, they were trying to be sneaky and took off after we were done shooting and drove three hours to go to a party—without telling us. We were supposed to be mad, because it’s a job and it’s a “real movie,” you know—but they showed up on time the next day. We talked about it, but I didn’t get mad, and it showed me that we had cast the film perfectly. It was proof that that we were on the right track with the right people.
TR: And also that they showed some grace in returning and understanding why people were concerned that they had departed. We had a collective thing that was moving at such a rapid clip that if any day failed, the whole thing would fall apart.
BR: If they had gotten drunk at that party and decided not to come back for the next day, the whole thing’s fucked. You know, its during Covid as well. If anybody had gotten sick, we’d be fucked. The whole thing was really threading the fucking needle.
TR: And isn’t that exciting? [Laughs]
SPW: I’m trying to think myself of sacred moments; all the ones that come to my mind are things that I’ve done in documentary, or at least with non-actors; just moments that surprise you. I try to shoot movies where I’m finding it as we’re shooting. I do think that’s the only way to find sacred moments working in fiction. It’s like, I’m still not really sure ahead of time what we’re doing and I’m hoping for those surprises that feel like an experience that you have where something is happening between people that wouldn’t have happened. Somebody’s getting to say something they’ve never gotten to say, or there’s a light on somebody’s face in a way that never would have been otherwise—things like that. But it can’t be planned, obviously.
BR: Yeah, there’s a real electricity that happens in those moments that you’re just not going to get on a traditional movie set.
TR: It’s a risk. But the surprise is alchemy.
SPW: That’s what keeps us coming back, for sure. Gotta have those moments. And maybe that’s a non-ego thing, this beautiful thing that we’re still hoping to experience. We’re not making movies to get the career, but yeah—looking for the sacred.
NP: Having just done nine Q&As in Australia with The Sweet East over the last two weeks, one question that often comes up is, “So, is the movie what you imagined it was going to be? Did they make your movie?” I always have to say, “No, absolutely not. Thankfully. If it’s interesting at all it’s interesting because it was filtered through Sean’s damaged brain, and it was filtered through all the people on screen, and if it was just the thing I thought it was going to be, I would not be nearly as interested in it.” I think it benefits enormously from the fact that other intelligences and talents are being brought to bear on the material; that there is, to use your word, Turner, alchemy going on.
TR: Yeah, letting go is exciting.
BR: It gives it life, or it gives it new life. I love that process.
TR: And yet, we still very much know what we’re after—so there’s a huge trust component, right? The [performers] have to trust that we know exactly what we’re after, so that they can be free enough to just exist in the spaces that we’ve created. And that’s a lot, especially for people who really haven’t been asked to do that sort of thing before.
BR: There’s so many lines in the film—and I suspect the folks reading this haven’t seen the film so quoting won’t do any good—but there’s so many lines where I’m just like… You’re shooting and you overhear what’s being said, and it’s that electricity—
TR: “Cut the smart on paper shit,” that’s just fucking awesome.
BR: And they’re not trying to be funny, you know? That’s just something I could never write, and if I tried, it would absolutely not be that hilarious.
TR: And what a gift.
BR: But it’s that letting go.
TR: Otherwise you learn nothing. When we were kids, our uncle always regaled us with stories, and his motto—he had it written on his wall at home—was, “He who stays home learns nothing.” It’s like, if you don’t surrender yourself to the world a little, then you’re not going to receive anything.
SPW: But he who leaves home, watches less movies.
BR: Well, yes, but he who leaves home will have something to talk about in order to make movies.
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer focused on moving image-based art; his writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Artforum, Frieze, Reverse Shot, The Guardian, 4Columns, The Baffler, Rhizome, Harper’s, and the Village Voice. He is the editor of Bombast magazine, editor-at-large of Metrograph Journal, and maintains a Substack, Employee Picks. Publications include monographs on Mondo movies (True/False) and the films of Ruth Beckermann (Austrian Film Museum), a book on Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Fireflies Press), and a forthcoming critical biography of Jean Eustache (The Film Desk). The Sweet East, a film from his original screenplay premiered in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
Sean Price Williams is an American cinematographer, film director, and actor. He is known for his textured, fluid camerawork (often handheld) and a heightened attention to available light. The New Yorker film critic Richard Brody described Williams as “the cinematographer for many of the best and most significant independent films of the past decade, fiction and documentary.” He was the cinematographer for the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time, Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits, and Nathan Silver’s Thirst Street. He made his directorial debut in 2023 with The Sweet East. HIs artist book 1000 Movies is available for purchase from Metrograph Editions.
Gasoline Rainbow (2024)
