Dan Sallitt
BY
Danny King
An interview with one of NYC’s true independents.
Four by Dan Sallitt streams now on Metrograph At Home.
In the centerpiece sequence of Dan Sallitt’s sophomore feature Honeymoon (1998), newlyweds Mimi (Edith Meeks) and Michael (Dylan McCormick) attempt to go to bed together for the first time. Old friends who decide on a whim to skip the stages of dating and get hitched, Mimi and Michael arrive at their Pennsylvania honeymoon cottage with years’ worth of expectations but little in the way of practiced physical intimacy. Sallitt observes their disastrous night with an unrelenting scrutiny—the scene runs for over 10 minutes—that is nonetheless wonderfully human. The couple’s mistimed gestures, awkward pauses, and unintentionally mood-killing comments cause us to writhe and squirm. Watching people behave messily and then talk about it afterward is just one of the revelatory gifts of Sallitt’s filmography.
A Pennsylvania native who has been based in New York since 1992, Sallitt first began looking at movies closely and writing scripts while a student at Harvard. He received a screenwriting MFA from UCLA, and then worked as a staff critic at the Los Angeles Reader. In 1987, he switched tracks, taking up a technical position in the computer industry, and he has since used his savings from such day jobs to fund his modestly budgeted projects. The writer-director-editor ingeniously reused the Honeymoon lakeside cottage—in fact, a family house—as the setting for his third movie, All the Ships at Sea (2004), which similarly focuses on an isolated pair working through innermost issues. Theology professor Evelyn (Strawn Bovee) bunks up with her younger sister Virginia (Meeks again) after the latter surfaces following years in a religious cult. At the cottage, the siblings spend days calling up memories of their troubled childhood and sparring over their differing belief systems.
Where Honeymoon and Ships are predominantly single-location works, Sallitt’s later pieces—including his most recent feature, Fourteen (2019), and the 17-minute Caterina (2019)—offer more communal tapestries, surveying the comings and goings of busy New Yorkers. Fourteen revives the notion of a combustible duo, as tireless Mara (Tallie Medel) does her best to steer her friend Jo (Norma Kuhling) through various meltdowns. Caterina adopts a more singular focus on Agustina Muñoz’s protagonist, who tries to maintain her altruistic ways amid a litany of disappointing social encounters.
An ardent cinephile, Sallitt populates his movies with textual references: Mimi’s Stromboli-like walk near smoky terrain in Honeymoon; a Hitchcockian burst of subjective tension in Ships surrounding a drawer of kitchen knives; Pialat-esque chronological jumps in Fourteen. At the same time, his characters apply lip balm, fill out administrative forms, and go to the bathroom. I spoke with Sallitt about these touches of everyday life and his transition from the cottage-set productions to shooting in the city.—Danny King
Caterina (2019)
DANNY KING: There’s something particular about the way characters sit in your films. All the Ships at Sea opens with that image of the chair. Caterina opens with the group of friends on the couch. There’s that line in Fourteen where Mara is critiquing her boyfriend’s posture at his desk chair. Why do you think that’s been such a consistent visual and behavioral element?
DAN SALLITT: I had never thought of myself as a director of sitting people! My hypothesis as to why that’s the case is just that it’s a selection of subject matter. I try not to avoid subject matter that, in certain quarters, might be considered uncinematic. I like to take things, as they occur, from real life, and not worry about how they’re going to come across. I figure it should be the other way around: cinema should form itself around the things that people do, rather than vice versa. In the scenes you name, the sitting is not only natural for people to be doing, but it’s a time when people talk. I don’t know if I tell people how to sit, but the desire to have that conversation people have when they’re sitting is possibly attributable to me. I would say it’s probably even a little rebellious on some level. But I don’t do it in the spirit of rebellion. You go where the interest is, rather than try to think of what’s going to be kinetic.
DK: Rewatching Honeymoon, one thing that stood out is the variety of ways in which Mimi and Michael communicate. The movie opens with them alone in the car, but then there’s an email from Mimi, and you show that in close-up. Then there are the conversations over the phone. Fourteen is also full of phone conversations. I was curious about this emphasis on different avenues of communication.
DS: In Honeymoon, it was definitely about the way relationships form. I think that’s the way it happens in general, especially in the internet era; I would have probably put letters in otherwise. But people communicate when their relationship is hanging in the balance, or starting to form. They do it in each other’s presence, on the phone, they write to each other. And I wanted that, absolutely. Again, some of these things could be considered not very cinematic, but fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke, basically. I was trying to get the rhythm of the way people interface when they’re thinking about love relationships.
DK: It’s also interesting that all that variety happens early in the film, because we’re trying to get a handle on their dynamic. They’re sort of dating, but then they’re back to being friends, then it changes again. It’s slightly disorienting trying to keep track of where they’re at emotionally.
DS: It’s the one movie I made that I don’t know if I would do it the same way now. I very much like the idea of the film, but it’s also very punishing. And it happened that I needed Mimi to exacerbate the situation without meaning to, just because it was striking her at a bad place. It was attacking her ego and she was lashing out. Maybe it wasn’t attentive enough to the dynamics of audience interaction, and would make people feel as if it was all on Mimi, the whole situation; I’m regretful whenever I get a sense somebody gets that out of the film… It’s a particularly tricky situation when there’s a sexual problem in their relationship that depends quite a lot on the tone between them. So it’s almost an invitation to the audience to think Michael’s not really part of this problem. I don’t object to the film, there’s a lot in it that I don’t think the cinema has enough of. But this particular dynamic, I have a little regret about it.
Honeymoon (1998)
DK: The four films Metrograph are showing divide neatly into “country” and “city” films. For you, what are the different ways of imagining characters interacting in isolation versus in a city setting?
DS: The main thing is that it’s a filmmaking transition and a transition in my life. When I started making movies, the first one I made [Polly Perverse Strikes Again, 1986] was more of an urban film in LA. But I started out scared of the difficulties of having a lot of locations. I actively wanted to come up with subjects that would put people in a particular place and leave them there. And I had access to this family cottage. I used it twice because of an early apprehension I had about the difficulties with this kind of filmmaking, how I was making it easier for myself if I could just have a location, get everybody there. I did what I could to make [the house] a little different, but I knew it was going to be noticeable.
Fourteen and Caterina are the last two films I made after a time when I was forced out into the world. I thought to myself, “Okay, I’ve made enough movies in that damn cottage.” And it’s not that bad. It’s not horrible to shoot around the city in more than one location. So I adapted because I lost some of my beginner’s filmmaking fear of difficulties. They’re conceived around different locations; the whole concept of Caterina, and pretty much the concept of Fourteen, is to skip ahead and show people doing different things in different places. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. You don’t know when you start making movies without any roadmap. You accommodate your fears.
DK: You often focus on put-together characters who feel obligations toward more wayward people. Evelyn taking in Virginia after her tough time. Mara and Jo. Caterina feels this in a more general sense, just her responsibility toward everyone.
DS: Even Honeymoon, people get the feeling the boy is a bit more stable and predictable.
DK: But the characters who initially seem to be in control often are ultimately not so much. What appeals to you about flipping the tables?
DS: It’s one more of these things where you’re trying to create a dramatic situation in a fairly static-state environment. It’s natural to look to difference between people to create a kind of tension and forward motion that you need. As for complicating it, that’s mandatory. It was the premise that the stable character was going to have their stability questioned or examined. In All the Ships at Sea, whatever problems the eccentric religious idealogue has, she loves purely. I hope nobody does, but if people come away from Fourteen thinking that Mara is well rid of this difficult person who sucked up so much energy, that would be really bad.
Caterina’s a bit different, but it’s exactly what you say. I think the concept gets more ambitious because the narratives of short film are very much reduced. You start shifting toward some overarching idea.
DK: The end credits of Caterina are listed according to scene. I also noticed excerpts of the Honeymoon screenplay online, and each scene is given a fun name. Structurally, do you consider the scene to be the foundational element of your work?
Fourteen (2019)
DS: Definitely for Caterina. Narratively, I’ve never done a short film before, and I intuitively realized it would be very easy to overburden this poor little 17-minute film. Almost any narrative felt like doing it wrong, going into fourth gear. I solved the problem in a cowardly way, I think. Rather than trying to find some way of combining narrative and the short film format, I just obliterated the narrative. I turned it completely into thematic connections. There are those six scenes, and nobody except Caterina is common to the scenes. She’s the only thread that goes forward.
There’s something similar about Fourteen and Caterina in that Fourteen was also trying to solve a problem. Not the problem of length, but the problem of how to shoot a film in five different pieces. Because I’ve got a job where I don’t feel like I can take months off at a time. So as I think about that movie, the unit is not the scene, the unit is the shoot. There’s five different shoots and they progress. It’s a practical consideration. I don’t think I would like to live and die by the idea that films break up into any kind of unit, but practically speaking, or in terms of shooting logistics, you wind up doing it sometimes.
DK: You have this attention to everyday behaviors. But you’re such a cinephile and you also have these references, or a visual style, that is informed by some of the great filmmakers. Do you see those things as being in conflict—the everyday, but also the cinematic?
DS: The everyday is not something I feel forced into. It certainly is something I went toward because of the way I shoot. But also, I like it. I’ve mentioned to somebody or other a million times that Rohmer is probably the most important filmmaker to me in terms of influence. He’s the only person that, when I saw his movies, I thought, “I want to make films like this.” To the point where when I made these little college short films, they were almost imitative. In his films, there are the simple facts of how people are sitting around a room, what kind of conversation they have. Certainly there’s other directors I enjoy thinking of. And I’m happy when I get a chance to do an homage. But I don’t see those things in conflict.
I’ve never got a chance to do an action film, a Western. I don’t know if those things would wind up having a different influence, if Rohmer would no longer be at the forefront of my consciousness. I’ll tell you if it ever happens.
DK: That would be a fun experiment.
DS: You start out thinking you’d like to make films like the great masters, but this is the only thing you could do for this budget and this idea. But who knows? Maybe that’s not the case.
Danny King is a writer and editor based in New York. His work has appeared in 4Columns, Artforum, and the Village Voice, among other publications.
All the Ships at Sea (2004)
