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The Sundance Question: What Roles did Chaos and Order Play in Your Films?
Photo: Kelsey Doyle, courtesy Sundance Institute. Each year Filmmaker asks all the incoming feature directors at Sundance one question. (To see past years’ questions and responses, click here.) This year, our question involves an issue that might be appropriate given the dramas of the previous year: chaos and order.
This year’s question:
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films?
“An Endeavor of Structuring Chaos”: Director Cameron Yates | Chef Flynn
“If You’re Not Loving it, Then What’s the Point?”: Director Michael Walker | Paint
“Chaos Has its Own Reward”: Directors David and Nathan Zellner | Damsel
“Unpredictable, Loud, Hot, and Dangerous”: Director Michael Dweck | The Last Race
“Our Computers Were Crashing Roughly Six Times a Day”: Director Aneesh Chaganty | Search
“How Are American Men Being Made?”: Director Bing Liu | Minding the Gap
“It’s the Moment of Spontaneity that We Remember”: Director Ethan Hawke | BLAZE
“The More I Pressured Him, the Worse He Performed”: Director Isabella Eklöf | Holiday
“The Film Needs a Scene of the Justice Lifting Weights”: Directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen | RBG
“You Have to Give Up Control to Find the Story”: Director Alexandra Shiva | This Is Home
“You Cannot Control Everything in Film”: Director Jim Hosking | An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn
“How Are We Not Going Insane?”: Director Sandi Tan | Shirkers
“I Literally Shot the Whole Movie with Dolls on a Miniature Set”: Director Nicolas Pesce | Piercing
“Cats are Totally Un-Directable, Even with Food” Christina Choe | NANCY
“One of the Most Chaotic and Stunning Moments of My Life”: Director Jeremiah Zagar | We the Animals
“The Rest of the Shoot Was Just as Unpredictable”: Director Alexandria Bombach | On Her Shoulders
“The More I Embrace Chaos, the Better”: Director Narcissister | Narcissister Organ Player
“Chaos Was Our Mantra”: Director Daryl Wein | White Rabbit
“My Own Feeling of Unease in Living with and on the Internet”: Director Bo Burnham | Eighth Grade
“We Went Where the Story Took Us”: Director Derek Doneen | Kailash
“The Film of a Drunken Monkey”: Director Nico Casavecchia | BattleScar
“Making a Film Is Always a Chaotic Experience”: Director Craig William Macneill | Lizzie
“It Must’ve Driven My Family Insane”: Reinaldo Marcus Green | Monsters and Men
“Cats are Totally Un-directable, Even with Food” Director Christina Choe | Nancy
“The Essence of Cinema Vérité Productions Is Chaos”: Director Matt Tyrnauer | Studio 54
“A Powerful Charge of Life in Front of the Lens”: Director Michael Pearce | Beast
“A Queer Punk at Heart”: Director Silas Howard | A Kid Like Jake
“The Chaos Grew into Something So Beautiful”: Director Crystal Moselle | The Skate Kitchen
“We Would Have Welcomed Some Chaos As Relief”: Director Tolga Karaçelik | Butterflies
“A Film that Tries to Understand Why Peace Failed”: Director Mor Loushy | The Oslo Diaries
“In Argentina We’re Always Under Some Kind of Crisis”: Director Valeria Bertuccelli | Queen of Fear
“Stories Make Order and Help Us Understand the Awful Noise”: Director Robert Greene | Bisbee ’17
“This Beautiful and Wild Community that Exists in Film”: Director Jordana Spiro | Night Comes On
“At a Certain Point You Have to Give in to that Insanity”: Director Kaitlin Fontana | Franchesca
“She Has Endured So Many Tough Situations”: Director Heather Lenz | Kusama – Infinity
