Frame by Frame: 'Weapons and Their Names'
Director Melina Valdez on how she thought about guns, water, and mother-daughter relationships in her new short.
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Melina Valdez’s new short film, Weapons and Their Names, began the way many shorts do: as a proof of concept for a feature she’d written. But rather than directly adapting one segment of the feature, Melina wanted to set the short in the same Florida world and explore similar themes. The feature was inspired by the aftermath of her step-father’s death, when his family from Tennessee came down to Florida and stole some of his valuable possessions. The incident left Melina thinking about cultural differences, grief, and coming of age. For the short, she married those ideas with other memories from her late teen years.
The difficulty was building a film around a character whose experience was very internal. “Everyone warns you against the passive character,” Melina says. “So how do I make that interesting? To me, it was interesting to just have things happen around her and see the progression of her thoughts. And then explore what it would mean if she can't hold in these thoughts anymore, if she couldn't be internal anymore.”
Despite being built around a passive character, the film was effective. “A lot of the comments ended up being about people really feeling for Luciana even though they weren't sure what she was going through completely,” Melina says. And it reaffirmed her belief that “sometimes it's worth taking a risk on something people say you're not supposed to do.”
When I watched Weapons and Their Names, I was taken with how beautiful and layered the compositions were. So I had Melina guide me through some of my favorite frames.
Here's the opening shot. I'm guessing you started here because it's this full circle thing, with water being this recurrent theme.
I didn't go into writing the script wanting the water to be such a prominent part of it. I think the landscape naturally calls for it. We shot in Holiday, Florida, near Tampa. We were by the water. There was a pool and a lake. I grew up by the ocean my whole life. So I think water is just subconsciously part of me. It also is Florida to me.
I also think that water felt symbolically true to what a lot of these characters were feeling. Water is both very comforting and scary, and that reflects the state of the characters. And then with this opening, it's one half of a bookend. I think it eases us into the flowing, ambiguous, turmoil metaphor. And when I see the reflection or distortion of water, I think it sets up things not being super concrete, being in a fluctuating state. A lot isn't totally grounded, and to me water is a good reflection of that.
It's also the first introduction to this color palette that you have, which is very of the natural world.
Yeah, me and my DP were very into Kodachrome — super saturated film that's very vibrant. We couldn't afford it, so we wanted to try to capture that without making it so saturated it's distracting. This was so quiet and internal that we didn't want it to clash too much. It was finding the balance where the color should be vibrant enough to emphasize nature and the location as a character. I wanted the color and vibrancy of the landscape to come out through saturation and specific compositions without it taking over the characters.
We shot on 16 mm film. We had a pretty humble package. We did a dana dolly. Nothing too crazy. The craziest rig we had was the boat rig. We had to make it look like they were far in the water. But we borrowed a neighbor's dock that was removable, two crew members paddled it over to our set location, and then we were able to rig the boat a little further away because we had essentially two docks of length. So we were able to cheat the boat by having it near us — with the exception of the one wide of the boat, which was actually shot from far away. We were at the edge of the dock. And the camera almost fell in the water a couple times. Don’t tell the rental house.
Here’s your lead, Cecilia Rene, who plays Luciana. Her face is so great. I'm guessing that was part of casting her.
Yeah. The casting process is my favorite part. I love working with actors. But so much is a gut feeling for me. I think I'm drawn to an authenticity that feels natural; I'm not crazy about Hollywood archetypes. Sometimes you can just feel that someone has a natural ability to express themselves. It's emotional intelligence, confidence, sensitivity. And Cecilia’s audition was in her car and it was very casual. It was like being on Facetime, and I believed her as a person and not as an audition. The pauses and little moments in that audition tape felt very important.
There was a lot we had to talk about in terms of the intense internal pain this character has. And that was her way of showing it. She was really able to bring it out with her eyes and facial expressions. A lot of looking and thinking and repressing.
I'm curious about directing that. A take when someone's just giving a look is hard.
I knew what it felt like to repress big emotions, and I communicated that with Cecilia. And I think naturally she relates to that and was able to put herself in that place. When I'm watching her I'm able to see if what I think that feeling looks like is there. So it's a lot of trusting the actor to relate to something very specific that you feel and letting them create their own language and seeing if you can understand that language. I just have to feel it.
Here, I really like how you arrange the different colors. How did you think about arranging colors and what different colors meant?
I vaguely remember I wanted each character to have a certain color palette. I'm really inspired by Pedro Almodóvar's color palettes. He uses primary colors a lot. I didn't want to totally jack that — not yet; I feel like really experienced directors can more so get away with stealing. But I essentially just wanted each color to have their own color radiance, so they just stand out amongst each other more, but also because it's reflective of their personality. Luciana I wanted to stay in yellows, reds, warm colors. Her friend, Mickey (Greta Hicks), kind of stays in blues and greens. The mother is in muted grays and a bathrobe until she's in a very vibrant purple in the pool at the end. So to me, it was mainly that I didn't want any of them to wear anything too similar. I needed them to be on their own journey. And I think making them all dress pretty differently is one good way to express that. Mickey’s boyfriend, Bryce (Greg Poppa), is the exception. The color was less important than him seeming like a real Southern boy [laughs]. We needed a shirt you would see that person wearing.
How did you come up with this moment?
I think I wanted to do a finger gun thing. And in that French film, La Haine, the moment where Vincent Cassel’s character is in the mirror is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.
I like breaking the fourth wall. I've resisted the temptation to have the character look into the camera each movie, and it always calls to me. But I thought this would be a really cool way to do it because it's jarring. It feels a little out of place. But at the same time viewers don't comment on it very much, which I think makes it feel like it does belong in the movie. Ultimately, I wanted a cool transition. I thought, This girl has this plan for getting her friend out of the funk. What if before we see her go to the gun safe, she just finger gun points at us? It alienates the audience a little. It reminds you you're watching a film. It's a little unexpected, which I think keeps people wondering and engaged. It's also relevant with the gun. And the fun part of this is that that film burnout at the end was completely natural because we had one last take to get this right. So right as we finished on her the film ended. It was one of those hallelujah moments.
I imagine the transition to that moment from the dinner table conversation might be practically tough to execute.
Yeah, because everything is very static. But I think to me that's a call-to-action transition, and I had to take the risk it might cut a little weird. But I think Mickey saying I have a plan and then the whispering and coming in is a natural build of excitement.
Again here, you have this great color palette of mostly natural colors and then her red shirt popping. And it’s Luciana showing the boyfriend up.
One interesting thing to me was this sense of gun ownership and who we see as gun owners. Not even as a political statement. I've gone to the woods to shoot guns. I remember feeling very condescended to about shooting guns. I think when a lot of people think of a gun person, they think of an older white man, probably from the South. And I think about how people felt really unsafe with the Black Panthers having guns. And I think of conversations about marginalized people being able to defend themselves against oppressive states. And all of these things are uncomfortable topics. I wanted to bite off the smallest piece of that without giving an opinion, because I'm still learning and educating myself on it.
But I knew one thing and it was that the person who's most comfortable with a gun in this group is probably going to be Bryce, because he shoots guns, and he wouldn't expect a 17-year-old Latina to know what she'd doing. I think that was a lot of fun to play with. The person who's died in her life taught her how to do this, so he's in every scene with her so to speak.
What I love in the image is you've foregrounded her and given her so much power. There's such a history in movies of guns connoting power. And now you've flipped who usually has that power and given it to this young Latina girl.
I've gotten a lot of comments on people feeling really tense and scared. And then they realize the gun never hurts anyone. I feel like if someone got hurt it would be gimmicky to me and kind of a cop-out. To me, it was more interesting that this sweet, innocent, internal person is knowledgeable about guns because someone she loved taught her about them. So it's not a romanticizing, but they're almost more like memorabilia. They mean something different. When she shoots the gun, it's almost an homage to this person she lost. There's not malice. It's tender. I don't think I've seen that very often.
So, we've got to talk about this.
This was one of the hardest things to write. Because it's the emotional climax and obviously that was categorized under "needs a bizarre moment." Very big emotion. And there were so many ideas I had, and ultimately the water imagery just kept coming back to me. And I thought, What's something that feels really emotionally prevalent? And to me that's a thunder storm or lightning storm. They're very intense, but also there's a swelling of peace that feels like a rebirth when the storm passes. But I didn't want the rain to be everywhere, because this is her release. Luciana is trying to be with her friend but is feeling like an outcast, so she needs something beyond what she's looking for. Something external. And she's lured into the woods as another form of escape. For me, Luciana is just trying to escape, to confront these feelings that want to be let out. And there's a point where she's in this nowhere land, finally alone, she's overwhelmed, everything's crashing down on her, and she needs to let it out. That feeling is so large, that the only way to display it is through this big powerful storm that gathers over her. It's just a visual metaphor for how she's feeling.
One thing that was really important — and it was really unpredictable with Florida weather — was that everything stay very sunny so the contrast of the storm felt strong. But that day the rain and the cloudiness was going in and out. My production designer, Annie Grafe, created a rain rig, we had a big pickup truck with a giant water tank, and created this mechanism that was like a hose with wood, and when we turned on the water it would pour down rain on her, and then we were able to VFX out a lot of the machinery, and also intensify the sun versus the cloudiness, and add more rain. I think it was a big risk, because it maybe feels a little out of nowhere. But when I watched the first rough cut, I was like, "OK, it's clunky, but it makes sense to me."
I love the way you split the screen here in this transition moment. And you're getting so much mileage out of the natural world.
To me, it's like another state transitioning. The mossy green versus the cloudy-sunny sky, it's this transitional emotional state. Which I think is what the end of the movie is doing. It's going from a hopeless, sad, tense state to a place where things may be OK.
These two shots, with the mother in the water, are gorgeous. She’s in the water, her husband's clothes are in there. There's a certain relief and sense of letting go, but you can also see how the world has beat down on her.
There is a lot to say about mother-daughter relationships. Mothers already deal with so much. I could not place my mother's grief when my stepfather died, but I knew that it was substantial, and something that I could never fully understand. So that's why the film's not from her perspective.
I knew that I needed to have a distance between them in the beginning, because I think the mother is in her way expressing grief through crying, through the bathrobe. She's embracing the feelings of sadness, and Luciana is escaping from them. The mother needs her daughter, but the daughter is an angsty teen, so she doesn't feel comfortable being close to her mother in that vulnerable way. And that vulnerability she gains through the thunderstorm is her half of catharsis. But for me, in order for the film to have closure, I wanted Luciana to see her mom having her own catharsis.
For me, it was very poignant to imagine this woman grabbing all her late husband's clothes and throwing them in the pool and then getting in and just swimming around with them. And then just wrapping herself in his shirt. That's something you'd only do if you're at a really heightened emotional state. The only way she can say she misses him is by doing something very out of the ordinary. It's like an interpretive dance, something you have to do to release something in your body. I think Luciana sees that and is finally able to relate to her mom.
It's great that they don't even have to say anything to each other. And that sunset is just so beautiful.
It was one of those things where we were fighting daylight. My DP, Robert W. Bevis, was like, "I don't think we even have the light to boost up a wide like this." So we prayed to the film lords. And then obviously we gave it a nice little face lift in coloring. I wanted to end on a bittersweet image, so it's beautiful and peaceful, but she also has a shirt wrapped around her head, which is a little unsettling. And I think it conveys all that.
RIP Roger Corman
If you read this newsletter, you probably heard that Roger Corman died, at age 98, this past Sunday. Corman, of course, was best known for churning out B-movies at a rapid clip and for shepherding the careers of an insane number of Hollywood’s greatest ever directors. Beyond those he directly mentored, his scrappy, low-budget approach was — and should remain — an inspiration for many others. Here are a few pieces on Corman I’m reading, listening to, and watching:
The 2011 documentary Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, from Alex Stapleton.
In 2015, Corman gave Filmmaker Magazine 10 Lessons on Filmmaking.
In 2017, Corman reflected on his career on WTF.
The Times put together a pretty good streaming guide of some of the best Corman flicks. As did BFI a few years ago.
Listings
Dan Arnes is looking for full time or part time contract work. He’s an experienced editor, producer, and composer. Check out his work here. Email Arnes.daniel@gmail.com.
Celia Hollander is looking for scoring opportunities this summer. Email celiaraehollander@gmail.com for private scoring reel and/or more info.
AMT Casting is looking for the lead in a SAG short. Rate of $232 + 10% per shoot day. 6-7 day shoot sometime between June 6 - June 14. The character, SAM MORESCHI, is 18-23, male or non-binary. Angelic, strikingly pretty face, more beautiful than handsome. Intelligent, determined, emotional, sarcastic, self centered, musical. Email TAPES.AMTCASTING@GMAIL.COM.
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