In 'Booger,' a Surreal Portrait of Grief
Mary Dauterman tells friend and fellow filmmaker Graham Mason about storyboarding and shooting pickups, directing rats, and the current Brooklyn filmmaking scene.
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In Booger, the death of a close friend leads Anna (Grace Glowicki) on a feline odyssey — searching for the cat, which has gone missing, and maybe turning into one herself. It’s a surreal take on very real sensations. The film is the first feature from writer-director Mary Dauterman. And in it, Dauterman’s portrait of grief is full of body horror and offbeat humor. Throughout the creative process, Dauterman occasionally turned to her friend and fellow filmmaker Graham Mason for notes. And this week — ahead of the film’s release in select theaters this Friday — Mason interviews Dauterman for Nothing Bogus. They chop it up on the ins-and-outs of storyboarding and shooting pickups, directing rats, and the current Brooklyn filmmaking scene.
Graham Mason: Okay so, for context for this conversation, I was thinking it would be helpful if I explained that I read the script for Booger a couple times, and then I also watched a few different edits of the movie, and then I saw the final version yesterday.
Mary Dauterman: You saw a really rough cut that had embarrassing clips of me acting in it before we shot pickups, right?
Yes! And that's a good setup for my first question, which is: You guys shot pickups, and I'm curious, was that always part of the plan? Did you kind of know you wanted to do that? And how did you strategize using your time for those pickups?
My dream scenario would have included pickups — I'd been doing some obsessive reading about different directors’ processes, and when pickups are part of the plan. I thought, That's so smart because I kind of know I'm going to be out of my gourd shooting this. I told Lexi [Tannenholtz, the producer,] I wanted to plan for pickups from the jump, and she was like, “Ha, this is an independent film.” So I tried really hard to get everything I needed on the shoot, and I did. I got all of my pages. But then of course, in the edit, I discovered pieces that would've been useful to have structurally. Plus the bigger thing was realizing I wanted to rewrite this climactic scene before the end of the film.
Oh, which one is that?
The scene right after she chases Booger and climbs up her fire escape. What we originally shot looked great, but it didn't really work emotionally. It was a larger transformation but what I envisioned on the page called for more interaction with the cat — played by a cat actor named Stewart — but he wasn't emoting because… he's a cat. So I wrote and tested out this new scene — I fully storyboarded it and we put it into the edit, and I am very lucky because Lexi is so good at figuring things out and she made it happen. It was a combination of two days with a proper crew and a few more casual days with just me, Grace Glowicki, and Kenny Suleimanagich, the DP, getting extra pieces I wanted throughout the film.
What about the soundstage day? Was that contiguous with the rest of your production, or was that part of the pickup chunk? You guys shot at Life World, right?
Yes. Life World is like the fairy godmother of this movie. We shot all of the nightmare stage sequences there initially. That was our last day of the July shoot, which was really, really fun to end there and just have Grace crawling around in fur, in mud. And then because I had rewritten this sequence, we needed to do it again — get more hair and more dirt in Life World. So for the pickup we had one day there and one day doing exteriors.
I wanted to ask about filming in New York and in Bed-Stuy. On this movie I produced, Good One, we shot two days in Bed-Stuy. We were mainly filming interiors, but it still was completely insane. Double parking the production vehicles and even shooting tiny scenes outside, it felt very challenging. Do you have any run-and-gun filming-on-the-streets stories from Booger?
There are so many Bed-Stuy movies right now. Our AD went from Booger to Stress Positions, literally two blocks down from us. A Different Man was shooting around the corner during Booger. And then my partner Kirill saw Tilda Swinton down the block shooting one of the exteriors for Problemista. It's almost like there's this Brooklyn language in all of these movies that were shot in that time period because this is the zone where everyone's living and making movies.
But yes, parking was always kind of tough. Luckily, I was pretty protected from the drama of that. We also shot this exterior nighttime scene in front of a park, and I remember that was a little bit chaotic because there was a drunk guy who kept walking back and forth hollering. Mostly I felt bad for the actors because they were getting taken out of what was an emotional moment.
Grace Glowicki is so cool. I first became aware of her from that short, Her Friend Adam, which is about a fight between a couple. In Booger, you have a scene where she fights with her boyfriend in the movie, and there's something about her where she's so sweet and goofy, but it's really pleasurable to see her blow her top and kind of go fiery. I was thinking she's almost like Joe Pesci or something, where you want to see them just get really, really mad and scream at someone.
It's true. She's so versatile — it's all funny, but it's all believable. And that fight scene in Booger had so many things going on at once, but she and Garrick were really great.
Yeah, it's a good scene. And I think, it helps with the tone that you're navigating where it's emotionally grounded, but then also doing the body horror stuff and also being funny too. It's a tricky tone. Was that hard to find? Was it difficult to see the tone through in the edit?
I was pretty sure it would work. Just based on my references and things I love, I knew it was okay to have an extremely emotional scene, then get really gross as long as the disgustingness is in line with the emotionality. And in terms of the comedy, I almost was like, “Is this a cheat?” I just cast really naturally funny people who make me laugh. And setting up scenarios that were cringey and awkward, I knew the comedy would come through. Overall it’s just a tone I'm attracted to.
What were some of those references you were looking at?
That was a conversation I had with Grace, looking for our guiding light tonally. She and I both really love The Fly. I think The Fly is extremely heartbreaking but also really funny and disgusting and absurd. I’m also just in love with the film Raw, which is pretty straight horror, but I think is also very funny. Also on the list was Black Swan. Black Swan is kind of funny if you watch it through a certain lens, but it's mostly emotional and terrifying.
I wouldn't necessarily say your movie's a horror movie in that there's scares. It's not like she opens a closet and something jumps out. And also it's not gory in a normal gore way. It has this other thing that it's doing that's sort of about discomfort and being distressing. And I had never really thought about that before, how Cronenberg movies don't necessarily have a lot of jump scares. They just have this sort of awful feeling to them. And I was curious how you think about body horror, and how you strategized doing body horror on a microbudget.
A lot of the hardcore horror festivals, it's not enough for them. From the hardcore guys — it’s always guys, ha — we’ll get, “That was barely a horror movie.” But it’s not just a horror movie — that wasn't really my intention. It's such an internal film. Less Oh, she's going to be mauling people, there’s going to be so many kills, and more of the really uncomfortable and unsettling things you find on or in your body in your own bathroom, isolated and alone. So rather than full-on gore, I was leaning into Grace's performance a lot, which I think is quite creepy. On the other side, there were the practicalities of “What can we actually build and make at this level?” The art department, led by Pili Weeber, and HMU/FX, led by Kelly Harris, were really crafty. There was syrup, hair spray, sweat, oil, just strange things to make it feel wet and gooey and unsettling. The only massive prosthetic build we did was the claw hands. It took five hours. It was something crazy like that.
Wow. And it's just a quick flash in the movie. They look great though. How did you guys do the moth and the rat and stuff? Did you have a creature fabricator?
The moth was actually a taxidermy moth that Pili found, and then we pinned it to a tree and we added some movement in post. Then we actually broke it and poured syrup all over it. It was like, “We only get to do this one time!”
And then the rat was a real rat. I remember we tried a lot of different things. Actually, I have one of our attempts in my office still. [Shows Graham a taxidermy rat.] I will keep this forever. We had a lot of different kinds of taxidermy rats and rat heads and rat toys, and it was very silly how many low-budget rats we tried. But for this scampering shot, that's a real rat. Lexi asked Amanda [from Dawn Animal Agency], who brought us our picture cat Stewart, if she had rats, and she did. So we got a rat thrown in! And something very sweet about them that the wrangler explained is that if you want a rat to run from one place to the other, you just put their friend at the other end of the room. So it was like the rat was running to his brother to go snuggle with him.
The bait isn’t cheese, it’s love. I'm jumping all over in the process now, but did you guys do a lot of ADR on the movie? Was that part of the problem-solving of the edit?
I feel like I did little sessions with everybody because I just did so much rewriting in the edit, lots of small things like, “This word would be really nice in this scene to clean it up.” And I wouldn’t stop writing. The craziest ADR is the shower scene at the very end, because we shot it without sound. So Grace matched her performance entirely, which is nuts.
You can't tell at all.
And the reason was because that was part of the pickups, too. We shot the original scene and then had it in the original edit, and Grace watched the cut and we were talking about it, and she was like, “I really want to do that again because I want to give it more feeling and I want to experience more of an emotional turn in this scene.” So we probably shot in my shower for, I don't know, two hours. It was crazy. The lens was fogging up. She took a long-ass shower. And then she went straight to the airport with wet hair.
In the bar when she's very feline and there's all this nose acting, is that ADR or was Grace making those sounds with her nose on set?
She definitely made insane cat sounds all throughout filming. And then also I asked her to do just a two-minute string-out of weird cat sounds for us to add in certain places.
Oh, the other thing I was thinking we could talk about, because also I feel like I was bugging you about this a lot during prep and writing Booger, is storyboards. I wanted to storyboard and you shared the storyboards for Inspector Ike, which are so good. You're a very talented cartoonist, so they're basically a piece of art in themselves.
Yeah. I love drawing, and having a stage where you're sort of drawing the movie is really fun to me. I love comics and cartoons, and I think there's something about the way my stuff looks that lends itself to kind of simple cartoon-y images. You're a really good artist as well. Did you end up drawing your storyboards for your whole movie?
Yeah, I did, and I'm really glad I did. When I do it again, I want to wait until the locations are locked because I'd be like, “I want this frame.” But then that frame would not be physically possible in the space. “Whoops!” But the thing that was helpful about having done it is being able to take a bird's eye view of the movie and see how it's feeling visually, and what do I need? And do my transitions work?
Yeah, I feel like it's sort of a first edit. Thinking of the movie from an editing perspective and doing that before you shoot is so helpful. As is, when you're in conversation with the DP or the production designer, being able to just call up a little thumbnail image of what you're hoping it looks like.
What other things do you use to talk to your department heads?
Sometimes I'll make overheads of where the camera's going to be around the room for the different shots. I learned that on a pilot that I worked on for Adult Swim over a decade ago that never came out. We shot it two-camera and the set was fully built, so we were able to be really specific about where we were going to put the camera.
So you are like, “This is the floor plan.”
“And here's where we're going to stick the two cameras.”
Would you do blocking rehearsal first, or would you have an idea before you got actors in?
I think a little bit of both. I think it's having an idea of where you think they're going to be, and then when you get on the set, you run the scene and have 'em sort of feel it out. I will say that I personally think I have room for growth in terms of blocking out scenes. A lot of my stuff is pretty stationary.
I think that's also a humor thing. I almost always lock the camera off and want the scenes to feel awkward just because that appeals to me. But during Booger I was reading the Sidney Lumet book, Making Movies, and apparently he would tape off the exact floor plan in a rehearsal space and then rehearse inside of this taped-out floor plan.
I think maybe part of it is, on the kinds of projects we work on, you don't have a lot of rehearsal time. The actors are just showing up to do their thing that day, and so you sort of bend your style into this more deadpan thing that is going to work because you don't have time to get really out-of-the-box in terms of, “I'm going to walk over here and then walk over there, and then the camera will go over here.”
There’s no time for P.T. Anderson shit where you're like, “And then we're going to fly over the pool, and through this choreography, and into this room.”
It sounds so fun to have that luxury, but I haven't had it.
I'm so curious about it. I mean, Grace was very generous in prep and we did rough blocking and talked through the script in all the locations we were going to shoot. But also, I wonder how much you lose if it's so, so rehearsed.
I will say for me, with comedy filmmaking or whatever, I like not being too rehearsed and I like being a little surprised by what the actors are bringing, because oftentimes their first idea or their first take on the material is super interesting. And if you do too much rehearsing, that first feeling sort of just goes with the wind. I've shot stuff where I did a rehearsal and I remember being so excited about little moments that happened in the rehearsal, and then we just couldn't recreate it on set just because it was this first airing of the actors’ ideas, and you can’t ever get that back. And so on set, I like to try to be rolling, to roll on the rehearsal.
Yeah, I do too. I mean, it's bad for data management, but I always do really, really long takes and then I'm rewriting and throwing jokes back at the actor and letting them do the same to try and figure out what's funniest.
I have a similar thing, too, where I'd rather just keep rolling and have it feel more exploratory. Rather than cutting and having everything stop. I like the idea of it feeling more like throwing stuff out and trying different things. I feel like with comedy filmmaking, a lot of times on set, there’s a take that the crew laughs at and you're sort of like, “Alright, we got it. That was the take.” But when you're editing it, you find that's not the best one. It was a different take.
Yeah. It’s weirder or smaller, and there’s something people didn't actually see happen in it.
Do you want to talk about the distribution?
Yeah, distribution is crazy and business-y and mysterious. I’m learning a lot. I have to say I feel very inspired by everything going on in Brooklyn right now and how everyone is putting out their films. Good One, This Closeness, Dad & Step Dad, Inspector Ike, Free Time. There's a lot of people making things on a not-giant scale that are all movies I really love, too. And the community is really, really nice.
Graham Mason is a filmmaker and producer based in NYC. He co-wrote and directed the movie Inspector Ike and produced the movies Dad & Step-Dad and Good One.
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