'The Scout' Captures the Emotional Toll of Creative Work

Ahead of its premiere at Tribeca Festival, Director Paula Andrea Gonzalez-Nasser discusses scouting, lessons from 'Free Time,' and why the edit was so rewarding.

When Paula Andrea Gonzalez-Nasser moved to New York, in 2016, she spent six years working as a location scout. Back then, Gonzalez-Nasser says she “probably would’ve found the idea of making a film about scouting annoying and pretentious.” But when she sat down to write her first feature a couple years ago, she asked herself, “What do I know?” And the answer, of course, was scouting.

Gonzalez-Nasser had just come off producing Ryan Martin Brown’s extremely DIY first feature, Free Time, and one of the many lessons she took away from the experience was that, in the early stages of writing, it was helpful to emulate another film’s structure. “So when I watched Chantal Akerman’s Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, I thought, ‘What if I try to apply this [segmented] structure to my scout experiences?’” she recalls. “And I think that wound up being the only way I could write. Because after fifteen minutes with a character I was like, ‘I'm bored. Let's move on.’ I wanted to leave each character after a certain amount of time and I didn't want closure.”

The film that emerged, The Scout, follows a location scout named Sofia (Mimi Davila) in a stressful, yet largely unextraordinary, day visiting various potential locations — and their idiosyncratic inhabitants — around New York. It’s a quietly moving and funny portrait of the emotional toll even an enviable job can exact. Ahead of the film’s premiere this week at Tribeca Film Festival, Gonzalez-Nasser discussed how scouting this movie influenced the script, becoming a fan of rehearsal, and why the edit was the most rewarding part of the filmmaking process.

Mimi Davila as Sofia in The Scout.

Beyond the structure, why do you think you responded to Les Rendez-vous d'Anna?

I've been a fan of Chantal Akerman's work since I watched News from Home. I love the way the letters work as narration. It's such a simple film and she just did it with what she had. And Je Tu Il Elle is similarly very simple but very personal. Jeanne Dielman really opened my eyes at what you can play with in terms of tension and time within a frame. Structurally, these films are a miracle and a prayer. And very affecting in how it takes so long for you to get sucked in, but once you are, they are very emotionally gripping and grounding. You just have to be in the right headspace to allow it to do its thing. And with Rendez-vous d'Anna, you're really invested in all these different characters because they’re the key to unlocking the protagonist who is so internal and reserved. It's also a film about a woman who we learn is a successful director but it doesn't really mean anything to anyone else in the film. She’s a walking phantasm in her own life and is very lonely. I thought that was such an interesting thing with location scouting. Every time I would tell people what I did, they'd say, "That's so cool. You have the coolest job ever." And if I disagreed I'd often feel ungrateful. It is a very cool and important job. But it is difficult and often a very lonely job.

How much that's in the movie came directly from your experiences?

When I first started writing it, I was just word vomiting scenes of interactions that happened to me in real life, but none of it was working. I would get defensive about the scenes because that’s how it really happened, without realizing that they just weren’t serving the story correctly. But eventually I went back to square one and started crafting fictional characters who could provoke or trigger the character in some way, while pulling personality traits or quirks from people I had met in real life through scouting, and then the script started improving. Removing my own real life experiences actually gave me the freedom to be more honest in the work. And when things weren’t working well on the shoot day it gave me the confidence to pivot, because I wasn’t trying to recreate reality. It let me explore other ideas as long as they were true to who these characters were.

A movie about a location scout kind of needs to have great locations. So what was the process of location scouting?

When we started prepping I was so anxious about the locations being good. I was like, "This is a movie about locations. If the locations suck, that would be awful." Because of our budget size I always knew I'd be the one scouting. And I was excited about that because I felt that I could always pivot script-wise if we weren’t finding the right spots. But what I didn't anticipate, which wound up being such a blessing, was that by me being the scout, I was rehearsing and researching the very type of moments we were about to recreate, so it was a very meta and surreal experience. I wound up finding more character inspiration from some of these early site visits, and some details of these prep scouts made it into the final shooting script. And that informed a lot of who we cast and how we built the schedule. Locations kind of came first — not just because it's a movie about a location scout — but because it was our biggest line item in the budget. Locations in New York are so expensive.

Mimi Davila and Max Rosen in The Scout.

I think my favorite location and vignette within the movie is the very rich man played by Max Rosen. I know that house is near your apartment. But how did you get them to agree to do it?

We got really lucky. A good friend of ours, Roberto Drilea, shot a feature about a year before we did, and they shot at that house. They were one of the first productions to shoot there once the house opened itself up for productions. They connected us with the homeowners, who were very sweet. At that point they understood how the whole thing worked and were a lot smarter about letting people come in and shoot. So it was more expensive than we had hoped, but it was such a visually telling home and very logistically friendly. A lot of the other homes in the movie are really lived in, but for this one we wanted people to feel like no one actually occupies this space. The home was immaculate. But Ale Anez, our production designer, went a step further to make it feel a little off-putting. We wanted to convey that there was no life here.

How much were you guys production designing the different locations?

We loved working with Ale on Free Time. With the schedule we had I knew there was no way we were going to have proper prep and wrap for locations. So a lot of what went into scouting was finding spaces that were like ninety percent of the way there. Ale and our art director, Kate Lopez, would have an hour or so before shooting call to add touches that were revealing or specific to the character that lived there. An hour to dress is not a fun thing to put a production designer through. But it was such a good rule to have for ourselves. We didn't have the infrastructure to have an art van to bring tons of stuff. It saved time, but I also love the way people's real homes look, and Ale was so good at adding little details that kept it authentic.

Your producers were Ryan Martin Brown and Matthew Romanski. Tell me about how they informed the script and the casting.

Ryan was involved from a very early stage. But he was pretty hands off on script development and script notes, because he was of the mindset, having just come off making Free Time, that it was going to be messy and it wasn't going to be a perfect script, and that that was okay. My perfectionist brain was like, "That's unacceptable. The script has to be great. Please give me notes." But in the end, he was so right about that, and I just had to make peace with the script being good enough to shoot, but by no means perfect. And of course Ryan had suggestions and ideas. But they were more around casting, or situational settings, or blocking than script notes. He understood that I would never be happy with the script — and I'm still not — but that I would be able to use it as a blueprint and that I'd be a better director than I am a writer.

Matt came on board a little later in pre-pro and he and Ryan were very helpful with casting. I am a big fan of writing with people I know in mind and hoping that they’d want to be a part of the film. But if they said no, I was then ready and open to changing the character a bit to fit other actors. We didn't do auditions. Every role was offered. There were pros and cons to that. But I think Ryan was really great at facilitating some of those early conversations with cast who I really wanted to work with but didn’t know personally. Matt Barats and Ike Ufomadu were some of the first actors we cast and when they said yes, I was like, "Let's go. We have a movie!" And with Mimi, I already had a relationship with her, but I was still nervous to approach her with the script. I called her up and said, “Hey I’ve been writing a thing with you in mind for the last year or so, wanna do it?”

I knew I also wanted to be a producer on the movie, in the sense that producing is so time intensive and I wanted to do as much as possible myself to lessen the logistical burden that would fall on Ryan and Matt. Producing also helped me make other creative decisions that I otherwise wouldn't have known how to make if I didn't know what we were working with.

Before we brought Matt onto the project and we were talking to people about producing, Ryan had this thing where he'd try to convince people this wasn't a good idea. Why would you want to do this? Are you sure you want to do this? There's no real good reason you should want to do this. And then if they still wanted to do it and they had good reasons for why they wanted to do it, then it might be a good fit. And Matt still seemed to want to do it after all that!

Actor Mimi Davila, Production Designer Ale Anez, and actor Matt Barats on set of The Scout.

Given the number of days you shot, I'm guessing you didn't get a lot of takes.

No, we didn't. We didn't have that many setups per day. I think it was like ten to twelve setups daily for the most part. And then we'd get into each day and realize there's so much to do and so much to set up. By the time we were shooting we were getting two takes, max four or five. There were only a couple of scenes where I pushed to have at least seven takes, because I was worried the shot wasn't going to work and I'd need time to workshop the scene.

Luckily, Ryan was the first AD but also the editor, so he really understood when we needed to prioritize a certain shot. He was able to look out for things that I maybe wasn't thinking about in the moment. Like if we have this variation on this coverage, we should get a different type of reaction in that coverage too. He would encourage me to try a scene many different ways just to have options. So often, in the moment you think you know exactly how it should be. But then you get to the edit and every single take is the same because you didn't try different things. And that was such a good lesson. A few days into the shoot I got comfortable with that idea. At first it felt strange because you’d try the scene a different way and it felt wrong, but often we’d stumble into great discoveries.

Were there pieces of direction you found yourself giving frequently?