Fresh Off the Simple Town Feature

Director Ian Faria reflects on the group's collaborative process, lessons learned directing a first feature, and how it all came together so fast.

Hello! Welcome to Nothing Bogus, an Indie Film Listings+ newsletter. The + is commentary, interviews, dispatches, tutorials, and other groovy stuff. I’m going to start with the +. If you subscribed for the listings and only the listings, scroll as fast as you can to the bottom of this email. If you came for the +, no scrolling necessary :)

For almost a decade, Simple Town has been pumping out bonkers short films and putting on some of the funniest live sketch comedy shows in Brooklyn. The group, which consists of Sam Lanier, Caroline Yost, Felipe Di Poi, Will Niedmann, and Ian Faria, excels at escalating different scenarios to their absurd extremes. As much as the group thrives in the short sketch format, though, the ultimate goal has long been to make a feature-length movie. They’d been collectively trying to write various scripts for years, cycling through different iterations of what a Simple Town movie might be, but they never could quite nail the third act. And then, about a year ago, Lanier wrote a script on his own over a few weeks. It was tight and simple, and though it called for some tricky stunts and visual effects, it was contained enough that they could make it on an indie budget.

The group all loved the script, and the question became, "How do we make this as fast as possible?" says Faria, who typically serves as the group’s director. “We really wanted to shoot in the fall, and we did. We got it together in less than a year.”

The production — which is being called Big Break — wrapped a 14 day shoot last month. I thought it would be interesting to pick Faria’s brain while everything was still fresh. He previewed what the movie is about, and discussed the group’s approach to collaboration, how they got the film off the ground so quickly, and what he learned directing his first feature. Despite being exhausted from a grueling shoot, Faria was glowing. “There's always this fear when you do something so much bigger than anything we've done you'll learn that you're not good at it and you shouldn't have done it,” he says. “And we all felt the opposite. That it's exactly what we all are supposed to be doing and we have to do it again as soon as possible.”

Faria on set. Photo by Colter Fellows.

How did you meet everyone in Simple Town for the first time?

I went to college with Felipe [Di Poi]. And I met him because a high school classmate was like, "Oh, you like comedy and he likes comedy." Felipe taught me that you could do comedy with your life. I didn't really know that was an option. And then he introduced me to Will [Niedmann], because they went to high school together. And Felipe was a dual degree, so he knew Sam [Lanier] through Brown. And then we ended up living together over a summer and making a video. And that was our first Simple Town video. And then we moved to New York and met Caro [Yost]. I remember the first time I saw her do standup, she wore a bright red suit and fell down right on her back. She had the physical control we all admired, and she is obviously an amazing actor.

And then I met Alex Bliss through Edy [Modica] shooting Nicole. When we went into Nicole I thought I was going to shoot it, and then Alex shot it and he taught me how to shoot stuff basically. And I'm just never letting go of that guy.

What's the movie about?

It's about Simple Town in the future. Only one of them — Sam — was successful. The rest are losers. Sam becomes a millionaire Hollywood producer-director-writer, making IP slop. And the other members of Simple Town visit him over the course of one night to try and get into the sequel because they want to ride his coattails. But what they don't realize is Hollywood has warped Sam's mind and made him into a serial killer. So it's kind of about people trying to perform for friends, and Sam genuinely loves his friends, so he's performing for them. And no one realizes the extent to which the others are performing until it all comes to a head.

The movie is a little bit of a farce. Sam just knew how to write something we could make. It's just the four people in a house, plus one other character. And because it's a farce, it's all about people performing for each other or misunderstanding each other. Or one person's lying to someone who's also lying to them. Sam said he watched Arsenic and Old Lace and that was part of where it came from. I love that movie.

Yost on set. Photo by Kate Sweeney.

I'm guessing you guys all liked the premise, liked the script. But I'm curious about the collaborative process from there.

It made it easy that Sam wrote such a formally tight script. That was always the hardest thing for us — writing a good Act Three. And Sam’s script almost does it to the point where it becomes a joke. Characters are constantly foreshadowing the thing that's going to happen to them. And I think that made it easier to not have so much debate around the movie. It just worked. So then a lot of the debate was just about character details or scenes that we thought could be longer or shorter or adding new ideas for funny lines, etc. And that just came about through the process of everyone reading the script a shit ton and doing group readings and then going off and doing their own drafts of different scenes. I thought it would be more improvised. There's plenty of improv. But at the end of the day, we mostly just did what Sam wrote.

Did you guys do a table read?

Yeah. We read it with our producers. Ani Schroeter produced it with Graham Mason and Sarah Wilson. And Pete McClellan was the line producer. And doing the table read, we could tell what works and what feels weird.

You have all of these amazing people working with you as producers, plus everyone in the cast is a writer and director in their own right. Were there specific notes anyone gave that wound up being really helpful?

Every day. But funnily, I mostly remember the notes that weren't helpful that people we didn't end up working with gave us. A lot of it was about genre. I think people have specific expectations around genre that we either met or didn't meet. And when we were talking to producers who we didn't end up working with there were a lot of notes of, "There need to be a lot more kills" and "You need a kill by page eleven" or whatever. Weird horror rule kind of stuff. And I have yet to find out if that was something we should've paid attention to. I'll know when we finish the movie.

A lot of the notes that were super helpful were Graham, Sarah, and Ani basically holding our hands through the process of getting something on its feet. And then the creative notes kind of came in during production. We had like fifteen people around a monitor watching this thing we were shooting, giving great feedback.

The thing I was the most nervous about was this idea that — the movie's not campy. It's not like Tucker & Dale vs. Evil or something where it's a satire of a specific genre. It's goofy, so the characters behave stupidly, but it's pretty sincere. We tried to have the performances never be winking or laughing at themselves. That to me is always the funniest.

Everyone in Simple Town is a really good actor. We were shooting shit really fast. And they were able to go from zero to one hundred so quickly. And that ability to tap into that level of performance so efficiently reminds me of the Twitter videos we shoot. Because a lot of those videos are just us walking around a room being like, "OK, go into the corner and do this" and then we do it for one take and move on. And I feel like that trained them to deliver really quickly and consistently, even for stuff that's a different tone.

Di Poi on set with stunt double. Photo by Kate Sweeney.

It seems like you guys have this really great group of collaborators. When one of you is directing a project, how does that collaboration work where you're both able to bring everyone into the process but also maintain yourself as the decision maker?

This was the most demanding version of that that we've experienced. A lot of the stuff we've made has been decision by committee, and this was too in many ways. Every decision is arrived at collaboratively and through honesty and articulation. But this was the first one where there were also like thirty other people that need one person to listen to sometimes. So there were some things where I got input from like six different people, and then I'd have to filter that to our production designer or someone. And that could've been a contentious process, but we've just worked together for so long and have so much trust that even with thirty people watching us and the camera being about to roll, Sam and I can come to a decision on something we disagree about in a minute. And usually whatever decision we came to was the right one.

When you first read the script did you imagine a certain visual style?

A lot of that was Alex Bliss, our DP. Me and Alex hand known each other for a long time and we watch a lot of movies together. And we basically spent two months shot-listing this movie. It felt very intuitive and I think we developed a shared language. The movie's a classic thriller-horror, and we were trying to think about Hollywood movies centering on ensembles. We talked a lot about I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream as these movies about four or five teenagers or people reacting to something horrible happening. So we tried to copy that visual language. And Alex is obviously also a director, so he's not just trying to think about what looks good, he's constantly telling the best story.

Do you have awareness of what your own — and Alex's — sensibility is?

I think we both at least lately have kind of populist taste. We were constantly trying to come up with camera moves that felt kind of Spielberg. How do you get a wide, a medium and a closeup all in one shot? We didn't use Steadicam, but Alex got this gimbal that he used to shoot half the movie. And he really snapped with some good Spielberg moments.

Lanier and Niedmann on set. Photo by Colter Fellows.

Did any of that get improvised on the day?

Totally. That's what's so great about working with Alex. There was a lot of stuff we thought we would have more time to shoot, and we were trying to figure out how to speed it up, so we were like, "Should we just do this all in one take?" So the scene of Sam searching around the house, instead of it being six shots, it could just be one shot. And then Alex would nail it. There's no notes giving or talking about it, because we both know what we need to do differently the next time.

What were some of the hurdles you did have to navigate?

There were a ton. There was a car crash. A dummy. Stunt doubles. A stunt team that was rigging this big net off this crane. We were lighting the woods at night, which we had never done. I was also extremely annoying about the rain. In the script, it's raining, and there was talk about closing the windows and hearing the rain. And I really wanted to see the rain, so Alex built a homemade rain machine, with a PVC pipe he drilled together with a hose. And it was a huge hassle. It was a tremendous amount of work for the G&E team to put that up every day.

Is there anything you wish you did differently?

There are a million things. I learned a lot about priorities. I think a lot about what my priorities were as a director, what the group's priorities were in telling a story. We learned how important jokes are to us. Prioritizing jokes over plot elements a lot of people reading a script would assume are more important. Number of days. Number of takes. How to give notes. I had a lot of fun giving notes. But I also learned how helpful it is to just go for another take and not say anything.

I also learned that some people shine on their second take and some shine on their sixth, so how do you balance that with the G&E having to wrap at 3:30 AM? And it’s going to take an hour to take the rain machine down, so we have to shoot out the rain machine side of the house first, but how do we do that and also get this person six takes on that side of the house? Stuff like that. Graham AD'd, and he did a great job — and saved the day more than once! — but it was tough. It had to be actiony and have all these practical effects, but the dialogue was also important enough that the actors had to be able to do scenes for a long time and get into it. We also rehearsed a bunch beforehand, and that helped.

Does anything else stand out to you about the production?

It was the best crew we possibly could've asked for. There was a point where we almost did it with these producers who were trying to get us to do it for way more money. And they were telling us it would take another year of pre-production before we could get it off the ground. And they didn't want to hire all our friends. They wanted to hire all the people who do commercials or whatever. And there were so many times throughout the movie where I thought, "Thank god that we cast the people we know and trust so that there's no debate, we're just making the thing we all see in our heads."

Everyone who I talked to on the set whose opinion I deeply trusted was like, "You're not compromising at all." I think a lot of movies with a much bigger budget cut a lot of things that we prioritized way early in pre-production. Like, Sam's character has a trap, and we rigged an actual trap that a person hangs in in the woods at night. Steve Smith, who did prosthetics and gore, made a dummy that we hit with a car at twenty five miles per hour. We did a four hour prosthetic on Felipe's head. We didn't have to compromise a lot of the stuff a lot of people do.

It's an indie budget. How were you able to achieve all these things?

It was just that everyone cared. I think it just comes down to who you surround yourself with. It was one of the most validating experiences for us. Some people were out in the cold at three in the morning and still ready to go, you know?

Listings

• Michael Bernieri is seeking a gaffer. Rate negotiable. Shooting in Massachusetts Dec 12 - 15.Travel and accommodations provided. Email michaellonbernieri@gmail.com with leads.

• The upcoming feature film IMPORT, directed by Paul Shkordoff, is casting the lead role of DANNY (Male, Black, Age 20-35. Skilled at basketball). The film follows an American basketball player abroad: Cut from his Serbian team, he stops at nothing to play another game. Learn more and apply here.

• Vuk Lungulov-Klotz is seeking a HMU for a short film. Clown makeup included. In NY. Shoot is in two weeks. DM on IG.

• SAGindie and Helix Collective are now accepting short film and composer reel submissions for the Film Music Connect Shorts Competition. 3 short films and 3 composers will be selected as winners, and will collaborate to create original scores for the winning films. It is FREE to apply, and the final submission deadline is 1/6/25. Learn more and apply at sagindie.org/FilmMusicConnect.

• Alek Abate recently launched a crowdfunding campaign for his short film Cement, to help raise funds for post-production! The campaign will be live until December 8th. Help fund the film here and follow the film on IG @cementshortfilm.

• Will DiNola (he/him) is a film composer open to new projects. He is interested in people’s passions and pushing the art of film scoring to new horizons, blending genres, and telling unique stories. He also writes about his experience in a newsletter called “do.”"

• Casting call for a new feature film shooting Spring 2025 in NYC. Non-Union and must be able to work as a NYC local. Synopsis and project details on this document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hqKKWIRmHndfIMAwZqGZLfvsG58blVqDdwTPNO-1UAg/edit?usp=sharing, submit to: freakscenellc@gmail.com.

  • The same project is seeking production designer. Synopsis: A game developer enters into a love triangle with an older investment banker and a former college classmate. Paid, must be able to work as a NYC local. Email resume and work samples to freakscenellc@gmail.com.

• No Film School recently published a massive list of fall film grants, labs, and fellowships. Check it out here.

• If you would like to list in a future issue, either A) post in the Nothing Bogus chat thread, or B) email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.).

And as a bonus for premium subscribers, Faria will share the Japanese films about ghost hunters he watched during the shoot that wound up being influential…