Frame by Frame: 'The Travel Companion'

Directors Alex Mallis and Travis Wood on taking blocking inspiration from Steven Spielberg, navigating the non-union casting pool, and stealing shots in NYC.

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FRAME BY FRAME

The Travel Companion

Following the Tribeca premiere of their debut narrative feature, Alex Mallis and Travis Wood discuss taking inspiration from Steven Spielberg, navigating the non-union casting pool, and stealing shots in NYC.

In the middle of 2023, Travis Wood started getting nervous that he would lose his travel companion pass. Wood had enjoyed the pass — a benefit that allows people who work for airlines to assign one companion to fly standby for free — for two years. But then the friend who gave it to him found love, and Wood saw the writing on the wall. His days of flying free around the globe were numbered. When he lamented the situation to his friend and sometimes collaborator Alex Mallis and Mallis’s partner, they laughed, and Mallis’s partner suggested they use it in a movie.

Earlier this month, that movie, The Travel Companion — which was co-written with another Wood collaborator, Weston Auburn — premiered at Tribeca Film Festival. The film takes Wood’s anxiety about losing the travel perk to the extreme. When Bruce (Anthony Oberbeck) begins dating Beatrice (Naomi Asa), Simon (Tristan Turner) hounds his friend and roommate relentlessly about retaining the pass. Simon is a struggling independent documentary filmmaker, and the film’s real interest is in the egocentric psychology that can go hand-in-hand with art-making. Despite being made for a shoestring budget, Wood and Mallis capture New York — and airports — beautifully. Recently, they broke down ten key frames from the film for me, and in the process we discussed their film inspirations, the biggest directing lessons they learned, and shooting guerilla style in New York.

You open the movie on this long single take at a post-screening Q&A, where the camera zooms out from a tight shot on the moderator to a wide of the group of filmmakers and the theater and then close on the main character, who doesn’t get to speak. Tell me about how you were drawing from personal experience for this scene — and then also the technical aspects of nailing this shot.

Alex Mallis: In general, one of our top line rules for this film was that it had to be honest. During the writing process, during the casting process, during the directing process, during the editing process, anytime the flag went up even a little, we reevaluated. And this scene was one of the first ones that we talked about. We were at IFF Boston, which is an independent film festival that features a lot of short independent films. We were there with a short film. We had just done a Q&A where the number of people in the front was almost equal to the number of people in the audience. I don't want to be too cynical, but there’s a sad pageantry of a Q&A where it's like, “What did you shoot on?” “Tell us about the kit.” “How did you come to this story?” All valid questions. But you work so hard on something for so long, and this is your moment to share it with audiences, and on occasion it can feel a little stifling or a little strange. So we wanted to kind of riff on that.

And we also thought this would be a really fun way to meet our protagonist, Simon. In the first couple of minutes of the film, we have this long shot where he doesn't get a chance to speak. And you know, we talked to Jason Chiu, our DP, about this long single take where you're kind of introduced to the world. It's a long zoom out with a pan and then a zoom in all the way to Simon. And we just had this idea of a single take, and we wanted to commit to it. Force people to be in this world and to experience this thing in real time. And we didn't shoot any coverage, so we gave ourselves no other option.

How many takes did it take? I'm guessing that it was kind of hard to pull off.

Travis Wood: Yeah, I think we had seven or eight takes total. We had three of them before lunch. We went to lunch, talked about what to change. And then, actually, the character who says, "I edited their film" had a different line before. But Alex's mom was like, "Why did they say that?” And then we ended up changing it to that line, which was way funnier.