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Shutter Angles
Conversations with DPs, directors and below-the-line crew by Matt Mulcahey
“The Budgetary Challenges of Getting a Dead Squirrel Puppet”: DP Sam Davis on Dìdi
Izaac Wang in Dìdi In the opening scene of Dìdi, the titular 13-year-old and his friends film themselves blowing up a mailbox and making a run for it while laughing hysterically. It perfectly encapsulates director Sean Wang’s view of adolescence as “the worst version of yourself, having the best time of your life.”
Set in 2008 in Wang’s hometown of Fremont, California, the coming-of-age story follows a Taiwanese American teen during his final summer before high school. Though not strictly autobiographical, the film was inspired by Wang’s own adolescence and the making of it was awash in familiarity. The main character’s bedroom scenes were shot in the director’s own childhood room. His grandmother plays a prominent role, one of many first time Bay Area actors in the cast. Behind the camera was Sam Davis, a longtime collaborator who Wang met on his first day of film school orientation at USC.
With Dìdi now out on VOD, Davis spoke to Filmmaker about pool noodles, dead squirrels and how documentaries and narrative features require a different set of muscles.
Filmmaker: Let’s start with a little bit about your background. You’re from Michigan?
Davis: Yeah, I grew up in a tiny town called Potterville. I started making films at a really young age. When it came time to start thinking about a career it was pretty obvious to me that’s what I wanted to explore. I ended up moving to L.A. when I was 18.
Filmmaker: When you started shooting as a kid, what era of cameras where we in? Are we talking the little DV tapes?
Davis: There were DV tapes at first, then I moved into the DSLR era. My dad was a high school football coach and the first camera I got my hands on was the football team’s camera that I would always steal. One day I was making one of my first films, this little war movie. I rounded up all the kids from my town and we made these makeshift military uniforms. We were shooting in a creek, and I fell in. The high school football program’s camera fell in with me. I spent an entire summer mowing lawns to buy the program a new camcorder.
Filmmaker: You ended up at USC film school and that’s where you met Dìdi director Sean Wang.
Davis: We actually met online before orientation. Everyone is so excited to get into that film school and there’s a Facebook page where you can kind of connect with your cohort in advance [of when classes start]. We had connected on there and chatted a little bit. We met in person the first day of orientation. It’s a really small group. Sean and I were both transfers. We transferred to USC as juniors and just did two years there. We became friends very quickly. The first time we worked together wasn’t until the summer between our junior and senior years at USC. We actually went back to Sean’s hometown, Fremont, and made a short film, the earliest seed of Dìdi, called Warm Springs, which is a neighborhood in Fremont. It was about these kids just being idiots and coming of age over the course of a summer in Sean’s hometown. Not many people ever saw it because it wasn’t very good, but Sean and I were actually just laughing at how we hadn’t even really realized how much that film was a proof of concept for Dìdi until we were at USC recently doing a Q&A.
Filmmaker: You’ve produced, edited and directed in addition to your work as a DP. When you got to USC, did you already know you wanted to go on the DP path?
Davis: Cinematography was definitely my focus at USC, but I don’t think I’ll ever be like a pure DP who only [does that role]. I think part of it is that a lot of the projects I’ve done have been documentaries, and in the documentary world I feel like it’s almost impossible to just be the cinematographer because you’re working with such a small team. Some of that also probably comes from the way USC’s program works. It’s a holistic approach. Even though my focus there was cinematography, I was learning about producing and editing. I think some of it comes from being a self-taught filmmaker as well growing up. Sean and I both started our filmmaking journeys at a juncture in film history where moviemaking was becoming more and more accessible not just in terms of getting your hands on the tools you need to make a movie, but also in terms of finding an audience with YouTube and the internet in general. Even before USC, I knew Final Cut and Premiere and had put my own projects together before I had that formal education. I really enjoyed the process of working with Sean and shooting Dìdi. Right now, I’m photographing a feature documentary. So, I’m not by any means looking to move away from cinematography, but I think I will always dabble in different facets of filmmaking.
Filmmaker: Your previous film with Sean, Nai Nai & Wài Pó, was a short doc about his grandmothers that earned an Oscar nomination. What are the biggest challenges of going from something of that scale to Dìdi, which was the first feature for both of you?
Davis: There was actually a lot of crossover. The short was made in Sean’s childhood home and we shot part of Dìdi in that same house. His Wài Pó [maternal grandmother] is in the movie playing Wang Wang’s grandma. She’s so good and she’s so real. She’d never acted before, and I think that there’s a lot of charm that comes from that. But making a feature requires a different set of muscles. It’s a much more formal process than our documentary work. On that short there was no schedule, no script, no crew. We had a borrowed camera [and] all the freedom in the world. When his grandmas got tired, which was often because they’re older, they would take naps, and we would sit around and wait for the perfect slash of light to come through the window and dapple a pair of slippers just right. There’s a freedom and spontaneity to that sort of elevated documentary process that we hoped to channel with Dìdi, but the reality of shooting a little indie movie like this is that time is so critical. When you have a proper crew, every decision has a ripple effect on your day and even the whole shoot. If we were to improvise and add something, we learned pretty quickly what that would mean. I think that was probably the biggest challenge, adapting to the more formal, organized process that is narrative feature filmmaking while trying to maintain some of that documentary wildness and spontaneity our past work has had.
Filmmaker: I’m ashamed of how few documentaries I watch these days, so maybe this is an outdated notion, but I still associate portrait docs with a handheld, vérité aesthetic. That’s not your approach here as you moved into narrative.
Davis: We definitely wanted to distinguish between the feeling of the photography within Wang Wang’s home and outside the home. We had this mantra that stillness is a 13-year-old boy’s worst nightmare. So, in and around his home, which is kind of half the movie, it’s like the camera weighs a thousand pounds. If there’s any movement, it’s very slow. It hopefully creates this feeling of a kid who’s stifled and feels the weight of his family. The idea then was for everything [outside the home] to be a bit more untethered. There’s not a lot of handheld, but there’s some Steadicam and dolly shots. The movie definitely opens up in terms of both lighting and camera movement. Part of the film’s look is also just about keeping it really simple and, in general, designing a look that didn’t call too much attention to itself, both for story purposes and also just the practicality of shooting a little indie movie like this with a cast full of kids who have really strictly regimented work hours.
Filmmaker: You shot on the Alexa 35 with anamorphic lenses, but cropped to 1.85, which is something you don’t see that often. Why that choice?
Davis: I shoot a lot on film, and we talked early on about maybe trying to shoot this on 16mm, but ultimately shot digitally for budgetary purposes. As far as anamorphic, I love the quality of anamorphic glass. I just generally prefer it. I like the way it rolls off. I like what it does to faces and this was definitely going to be a movie about faces. But the 2.39 aspect ratio just felt too sleek for this movie. In testing lenses, we realized that we could kind of have the best of both worlds [if we cropped]. We chose Arri Zeiss Master Anamorphics those because the distortion wasn’t crazy, but it still added a little extra something optically. Without adding any physical process and without complicating anything during the shoot day, those lenses are like an instant aesthetic just from the quirks of the anamorphic glass.
Filmmaker: How many days was the shoot?
Davis: I think we had 25 days.
Filmmaker: That’s not a bad schedule for a movie like this.
Davis: No, not bad, but if you consider that [our lead actor] Izaac Wang was in basically every shot and we only had either five or seven hours a day with him, depending on the day of the week, it’s almost like a 25-day shoot becomes more like an 18- or 19-day shoot. The movie for me was deceptively uncontained. A lot of the movie takes place on a computer screen and there’s a lot that takes place inside the home, but then there are all these other secondary locations where we just have one or two scenes. That aspect made it feel difficult to pull off in the amount of time we had, but we did it.
Filmmaker: How did you maximize your days with your lead having a limited number of hours he could work? This doesn’t feel like a movie with giant lighting set-ups where you could spend that downtime rigging. Did you still do 12-hour days?
Davis: We still generally did 12-hour days. We were clever in all the ways we could think of, [like] Sean body doubling for Izaac anytime we didn’t see his face. Our directing mentee, Anna [O’Donnell], would also body double for him. There’s a sequence where Wang Wang runs away from home, and you see him walking through the streets at night. That was Anna, our directing mentee. We had a little wig for her, and she was approximately the same size as Izaac. There were some shots where you could tell, and of course those didn’t make the movie. Anytime we’re over Wang Wang’s shoulder, it’s not him. We could also spread out the hours we had with Izaac. We could send him to school for a certain amount of time in between setups and do other things with other coverage, but it was always critical that as soon as he walked on set, we had to be ready because that clock started ticking. Then as soon as we had an opportunity to do something with other actors or that didn’t involve him, we would send him away to school to start clocking his school hours.
Filmmaker: Let’s talk about the opening scene. Did Izaac operate that shot himself? Was that a practical explosion?
Davis: Yeah, the explosion was practical. We did that toward the tail end of the shoot, which is a fun way to go out. I want to say we did it maybe five or six times, something like that. We had a great effects team who semi-dismantled the mailbox so that it would explode. There are some hidden cuts in that frenetic handheld shot on that DV cam. The first piece of it was operated by Sean. I don’t think we ever even discussed who would operate that stuff, but there’s an autobiographical component to part of the movie and that was part of Sean’s childhood, filming videos and skating. It was just so obvious that should be literally his perspective. He operated most of the skating found footage as well and the first part of the mailbox explosion. Then we just hid a cut, and Izaac recorded the part where the camera flips on himself. That freeze frame [that ends the scene] was actually in the script, so we had to make sure we got a frame that we liked.
Filmmaker: What camera did you use for the skating footage? Did one of you still have an old DV camera?
Davis: I can’t remember if Sean did, or if he found another version of [the one the used to have]. I know it was very true to his experience and really nostalgic for him. We had a few different camcorder options, and I think the one that we shot on was also the prop that you see Wang Wang operating on camera.
Filmmaker: At one point, Wang Wang watches a YouTube video called something like “How to kiss like a pro.” What’s the story behind making that?
Davis: I think the version originally described in the script was based on a real YouTube video. We tried to get in touch with them and never heard back, so we said, “We’ll just make it ourselves.” We tasked Anna and Sophia, the directing mentees, with directing that and they did a really good job. They worked with some friends of [producer Carlos López Estrada], and Carlos’ dog also makes a little cameo sitting on the sofa with them. They put that together and had a lot of fun with it. I think they used like an old-fashioned webcam for that. We paid a lot of attention to that kind of thing, because we wanted the film to be immersive and nostalgic in every way it could be in channeling the dawn of social media and those MySpace/Facebook days. Our editor, Arielle Zakowski, and Sean did such a good job with the computer screen storytelling. Some of my favorite scenes in the movie are ones that I had very little to do with and that’s because they’re so thoughtfully edited, like the AOL instant messaging scenes. The comedic timing of those is razor sharp.
Filmmaker: What was your lighting package like on the movie? What were some of your hero units? There’s a lot of scenes in Wang Wang’s house motivated by sunlight from windows. What were you pushing through there?
Davis: I come primarily from a documentary background and so, generally speaking, for a day interior I always like to start with the blank canvas of a nice window light, then we could supplement and shape as needed. We had one M90, which was our biggest unit, and would sometimes push that through windows. Then we had a lot of small LEDs for the interiors, things like Lite Mats and LED tubes. I had never used pool noodles before. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but it’s just as crude as it sounds. It’s a literal pool noodle that you cut and then stick around an LED tube. I love the quality of light that we got from those. We would carry those around like little wands and that was a really helpful and fast way to work.
Filmmaker: How did you light the playground night exterior where Wang Wang and his crush are hanging out? There are two lights on poles in the shot. Where those already there in that location?
Davis: There were no existing lights there, no street lights or anything. So, we decided—and this is one that kept me up at night —to just put a light in the shot and then they painted out the stand. You just sort of assume that it’s a practical over the playground. I think it worked really well.
Filmmaker: Do you have any fun stories about the dead squirrel flashback scene?
Davis: The squirrel went off the rails a little bit. [laughs] Our vision for it was much more grounded. We thought it would be a realistic looking dead squirrel, but it came out looking a little more tongue in cheek. We ran into the budgetary challenges of getting a dead squirrel puppet and not really having the ability to properly fabricate something. It’s just one of those things that you have to embrace, and I think it lends the movie this unapologetic indie spirit. There are all kinds of those moments, where it’s like the movie is one thing in your head and then when you start to make it, especially with a movie on this scale, there are things you can’t control and it’s better to just embrace the chaos. The squirrel puppet being sort of kitschy was one of those things. It’s hilarious looking back to when we first saw it, because we were like, “Well, that’s not going to work at all.” Those limitations can inform the spirit of the movie.
